The most successful and influential Americans come from a surprisingly narrow range of ‘elite’ educational backgrounds

Abstract

The highest-achieving figures in politics, business, academia, and the media dominate public discourse and wield great influence in society. Education—perhaps especially at “elite” colleges and universities—may lie at the heart of the divide between the general public and these top achievers. In this paper, we build a new data set for the American “elite” and systematically examine the link between selective schools and outstanding achievements. In Study 1, across 30 different achievement groups totaling 26,198 people, we document patterns of attendance at a set of 34 “Elite” 34 schools, the 8 Ivy League schools, and Harvard University in particular. In Study 2, we surveyed 1810 laypeople to estimate how well they are aware of the key empirical facts from Study 1. We found that exceptional achievement is surprisingly strongly associated with “elite” education, especially obtaining a degree from Harvard, and the general public tends to underestimate the size of this effect. Attending one of just 34 institutions of higher education out of the roughly 4000 in the U.S. appears to be a critical and surprising factor separating extraordinary achievers from others in their fields.