Hiding in plain sight

Walter Russell Mead and his team at The American Interest note yet another study in which we determine the blindingly obvious:

High levels of education-based assortative mating are likely both a cause and consequence of economic inequality. It’s a cause because children born to two highly educated parents have more resources at their disposal than two children born to less-educated parents, and it’s a consequence because a wide social distance between groups may make them less likely to intermingle. Regardless of its relationship with economic inequality, however, it’s clear that the steady rise of educational homogamy is indicative an ever-more siloed elite (a group that, in our opinion, is increasingly out of touch with non-elites, and increasingly beholden to establishmentarian groupthink).

Of course this happens. It's a variation on the old story about Pauline Kael, the film critic from the New Yorker who was dumbfounded that Nixon had won the 1972 election because she didn't know anyone who voted for him. Men and women who share similar backgrounds and worldviews are much more likely to pair up than those that don't.

The elite is this country is, as Mead also points out, ostensibly meritocratic:

The irony here is that a partial cause of this trend is the rise of meritocracy. Today, women are more likely to go to college and peoples’ wages are more tightly correlated with their education, which increases the incentive to marry someone of a similar educational status. These developments are related to the end of class-based privilege and the rise of a fairer, more egalitarian system. And yet, a byproduct of our hyper-meritocracy is an ever-more pronounced system of educational assortative mating that makes our society more stratified and more unequal.

Well, yeah. If you are an outsider, you do need to have significant academic chops to get into the an Ivy League school, but the dirty little secret of these places is that rich parents, especially those who are alumni of the school, are ultimately able to bypass the admissions gatekeepers and get their offspring with less than impressive credentials to quietly transfer in after a freshman year elsewhere -- we saw kids do this at my alma mater, which has the reputation in certain circles of being a safety school.

Of course, the point of getting into an Ivy isn't the education you receive per se; what really matters is the access you get to the alumni directory. There are doors that open for an Ivy League grad that don't open for a brilliant kid who attended, say, Oklahoma State. Understand that I'm not decrying this situation -- people are going to do what they do and allegiances and affinities are powerful. It's rare to find people who don't care at least tangentially about these allegiances. We all take care of our own -- it's human nature to do that.