Will Joe Biden’s Cabinet Picks Reignite Debates About Elite Colleges?

With the Biden transition to the presidency now officially underway, attention is turning to the President-elect’s choices for his cabinet and senior advisor roles in his administration. This week, Biden unveiled the names of those he’s chosen to fill leadership positions on his national security and foreign policy teams. His nominees included several women and people of color, who would, if confirmed, be historic firsts in their positions.

As a group, they also possess decades of outstanding diplomatic experience, professionalism, and government service and signal a return to a more conventional U.S. foreign policy. The New York Times described them as “a group of former senior officials from the Obama administration… who “share a belief in the core principles of the Democratic foreign policy establishment: international cooperation, strong U.S. alliances and leadership, but a wariness of foreign interventions after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

They are also possess outstanding academic pedigrees.

• Avril Haines is Biden’s choice to serve as Director of National Intelligence. Ms. Haines, who, if confirmed, would be the first woman to head the agency, attended the University of Chicago where she earned her undergraduate degree in physics in 1992. After enrolling in a doctoral program at Johns Hopkins University, she dropped out to open her own book store with her husband. In 2001, she earned a law degree from the Georgetown University Law Center.
• Mr. Biden’s pick to be Secretary of State, Antony Blinken attended Harvard University, worked on The Harvard Crimson and graduated Magna cum laude. After Harvard, Blinken went to Columbia University from which he obtained a JD in 1988.
• Biden nominated Alejandro Mayorkas to be his Director of Homeland Security. Mr. Mayorkas, who was born in Cuba, would be the first Latino and first immigrant to lead the Department. He earned a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1981. After Berkeley, he attended Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where he was awarded a JD.
• Biden tabbed Jacob “Jake” Sullivan to be his National Security Adviser. Sullivan received a BA in political science from Yale University in 1998. He also earned an MPhil after receiving a Rhodes Scholarship to study international relations at the University of Oxford. Following that, he returned to Yale for his law degree, awarded in 2003.
• Biden chose Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a 35-year veteran of the Foreign Service, as his ambassador to the United Nations, a position that Biden will include on his National Security Council. Ms. Thomas-Greenfield earned a BA in 1974 from Louisiana State University, which she followed with a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
• Rounding out the group introduced on Tuesday was John Kerry, the former Pennsylvania Senator, U.S. Secretary of State, and Democrat nominee for President in 2004. Mr. Kerry will serve as Biden’s International Climate Envoy. He obtained his BA in political science from Yale University in 1966 and his JD from Boston College in 1976.

Among the more notable characteristics of the nominees is the prominence of elite colleges and universities as their alma maters. They have sparkling collegiate resumes, which have been praised as further indicators of their competence, Marco Rubio’s snarky tweet, notwithstanding.

But the academic credentials of these accomplished professionals do raise basic questions: is an elite college education worth it, and just how important is attending a prestigious college to one’s future career. These issues are examined thoughtfully in Frank Bruni’s Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania. And they prompt other questions: Does a degree from an elite college virtually assure later success? Is it a prerequisite for high-level, effective leadership? Are elite colleges the only source from which great talent can be mined?

Admission to a top-shelf college remains the Holy Grail for many individuals who’ve bought into the notion that success in life will be all but guaranteed by graduating from an elite institution. Conversely, failure to make it into an elite school is met in some quarters with the worry that attending a “second-tier” college will predestinate a third-rate career.

Intrigued by Bruni’s careful challenge to the idea that attending an elite college was essential to distinctive achievements later in life, I conducted my own study, published in 2017 with the title, Degrees and Pedigrees.

I examined the educational histories of 344 of the country’s highest-profile chief executive officers, who, at the time, led the largest and most influential public and private organizations in America. Included were the nation’s 50 governors, the mayors of our 50 largest cities, the CEOs of the 30 companies listed on the DOW plus the CEOs of the 20 largest Fortune 500 companies not on the DOW, the heads of the country’s 50 largest foundations, the 40 active-duty four-star officers in the uniformed services of the United States, the publishers of the 40 largest circulation newspapers plus the CEOs of the 10 leading TV news channels, and the presidents of the 50 top-ranked universities and liberal arts colleges (with ties) in the country.

For the entire sample of 344 CEOs, 97% had earned an undergraduate degree. But only 36% of the executives with a college degree graduated from one of the nation’s top 50 colleges and universities. In every CEO category except the presidents of elite universities themselves, the majority of leaders received their degree from a non-elite institution. With respect to graduate education, roughly half of the CEOs with a professional or graduate degree earned it from one of the top 50 universities; the rest graduated from institutions of lesser repute.

These statistics, and others, make clear that a college education is vital preparation for leadership of America’s major institutions. But the data also suggest that the impact of that education does not depend on an institution’s prestige, its national ranking, or its selectivity. Our national leaders have always earned their degrees from a rich diversity of institutions, including elite colleges, land-grant and major research universities, small religious schools, municipal institutions, regional public universities, and community colleges.

While an elite college education conveys many unique opportunities, it doesn’t have a corner on the competence market. Think of it as an advantage, not a necessity; a positive signal rather than an absolute qualification.

Many of our national leaders have attended colleges that served their personal needs more than glossed up their resumes. The county ultimately benefitted greatly from their talent, often nurtured at colleges that barely get a nod in the various college ranking schemes.

And, on the flip-side, graduates of elite institutions don’t always distinguish themselves in careers of public service. Before Democrats and progressives become overly enamored by glittering educational resumes alone, they need to remember that President Trump was also unduly attracted to Ivy Leaguers for his cabinet, including Mike Pompeo (Harvard), Steven Mnuchin (Yale), William Barr (Columbia), Alex Azar (Dartmouth and Yale) and Wilbur Ross (Yale and Harvard).