Certain spaces, such as conference rooms in Manhattan law firms, the quiet corridors of Washington consulting offices, or the dinner tables at Davos, exude a certain quiet confidence. After enough time spent exploring, a pattern begins to take shape. One thing that a disproportionate number of individuals occupying those spaces have in common is a diploma from a very select group of educational institutions. Harvard. Yale. Princeton. Penn. The clarity of the numbers supporting this observation is nearly ridiculous. Less than 5% of the nation’s undergraduate population is made up of students from Ivy League universities and a few other highly selective institutions, such as Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago. However, they make up about one-third of all journalists at the New York Times and over 12% of Fortune 500 CEOs.
Whether attending one of these schools truly causes any of that is the question that most people ignore because the gap seems too obvious to investigate. Or if the type of adolescent who passes the Princeton entrance exam would have succeeded at Michigan or Texas anyhow.
After years of researching economic mobility with Harvard’s Raj Chetty, Brown economist John Friedman now has a theory that breaks through much of the clutter. The faculty is not to blame. It’s not the diploma’s brand name. It’s not even the well-known alumni network that most people think it is. The most important thing, according to Friedman, is something more difficult to measure: daily, consistent exposure to other exceptionally talented and driven individuals. sharing a dining hall with them at 11 p.m. prior to an organic chemistry exam, going through problem sets with them, and determining club leadership with them. He basically argues that the environment that Ivy League tuition purchases is a highly concentrated training ground for precisely the kinds of high-stakes, high-pressure professional worlds that these graduates disproportionately end up entering.
Although it’s a convincing theory, it’s not totally comfortable. It suggests that the benefit is a little bit circular. The world rewards the schools for drawing outstanding students who improve one another. However, the research only partially addresses the obvious follow-up question raised by Friedman’s framing: better at what, precisely? Because a closer look at the data indicates that the Ivy League advantage is not shared equally. Students who attend prestigious universities and go on to pursue careers in fields like law, finance, consulting, and medicine—all of which have established pipelines that go straight through these institutions—seem to experience tangible, real career benefits. The equation might be more difficult for students who pursue careers with different hiring practices.
The Opportunity Insights study, which compared the earnings and career paths of students who were waitlisted at prestigious universities with those who ended up elsewhere, discovered that, on average, the difference in income between attending an Ivy and a reputable public university was statistically insignificant. Access to prestigious graduate programs, which almost doubled, and the chance of landing at a prestigious firm, which tripled, were not insignificant. It’s possible that the Ivy League premium is more about a specific door—a narrow one—that opens into certain industries and virtually nowhere else than it is about knowledge gained.
This subtlety is often lost in the larger discussion, which has recently become more heated. According to a 2023 study, children from families in the top 1% of earners had a 34% higher chance of being admitted to prestigious universities among applicants with identical test scores. This effect is exacerbated by recruited athlete slots, legacy preferences, and the subtle benefits of private school prestige. According to Raj Chetty, these schools serve as entry points to the upper classes of society, and they currently admit affluent students at rates that belittle the meritocratic narrative they present about themselves. It’s difficult to ignore the paradox: according to their own admissions data, schools that purport to develop tomorrow’s leaders are essentially recycling today’s.
However, completely discounting the Ivy League misses something important. In some domains, the environment argument is valid. Academic medicine, corporate law, investment banking, management consulting, and other fields that depend on credentialing, referrals, and concentrated networks seem to reward the Ivy pedigree in ways that other fields just do not. Cornell and University of Illinois computer science graduates may work for the same software company and earn almost the same salaries. After attending the Ivy, a pre-law student’s path might be significantly different.
This research still has a lot of unanswered questions. It’s unclear yet whether the impact lasts across generations or changes as skills-based hiring and remote work undermine the traditional gatekeeping systems. What is certain, though, is that the Ivy League advantage—whatever it is—has always been more focused than the mythology implies. There was never a complete assurance. It was always a wager on a specific type of career, in a specific type of world, and through a specific type of door. The room you hope that door leads to will determine whether or not it is worth $90,000 annually.
