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This lingering sensitivity, which I am chagrined to confess, has been exaggerated by the cities where I have lived and the work that I do. Both New York and Washington revere the Ivy League like Club Med worships tanned bodies and a strong backhand. Odd how when visiting the Midwest I drop the University of Michigan into conversation with an avidity I rarely display back East. Lawyers and physicists may often rate colleagues by the quality of their professional education, but an enduring adult fascination with undergraduate pedigrees remains acute in the fields I know well, such as journalism and politics, where it is still possible to achieve success through talent, luck and a good B.A. degree. For example, at the Washington Post in the early 1980s, so thick were the references to bright college days in Cambridge, Mass., that I sometimes felt I was working at the Harvard Crimson alumni association. Peggy Noonan in her best-selling White House memoir, What I Saw at the Revolution, loudly complains that her colleagues in the Reagan Administration "were always asking me what college I went to." Noonan, sensitive to the status slights that accompany her Fairleigh Dickinson degree, theorizes that in a fluid environment like the White House, people pop the Ivy League question to categorize one another while simultaneously underscoring their own importance, as in "Yes, she does seem bright; she went to Radcliffe, but before my wife."
My instinct is to join Noonan in her populist fury against the "Harvardheads" in government. But rationally I know that at my age (and Noonan's) such resentment is silly. For millions of college-educated men and women like us, whose undergraduate histories do not automatically inspire awe, the struggle is over -- and we won. For we have reached the stage in life % where what we have learned and what we do with it are all that should matter. In fact, aside from the pride of parents who emblazon their children's college crests on the rear windows of their Accords and Audis, it is hard to find much objective evidence that a thick envelope from the Ivy League possesses the power to transform lives. I recently asked half a dozen sociologists whether there is any way to measure the career advantages that come with a prestigious undergraduate degree. Their consensus was yes, of course, Princeton and Yale alumni are disproportionately successful, but it is unclear whether this superiority is due to the factors that originally impressed the admissions committees or the supposed added value of their elite education. It was the old nature-vs.-nurture debate transported to the tables down at Mory's.
Applied to my own life, their message seems clear. I am pretty much the same person I would have been had Harvard said yes -- or had Dartmouth written apologetically to say that the envelopes had been switched at birth and I was really a prince, not an educational pauper. Yet I wonder. My own sense is that those rejection letters changed me in ways that I am still hard-pressed to define. Total defeat is never easy, especially when it comes so suddenly so young. Sometimes I fear the experience eroded my self-confidence. But mostly I prefer to think it toughened me, taught me humility, trained me to value what I accomplished on my own and -- most important -- tempered my tendencies toward snobbery. Not a bad haul from six form letters mailed a quarter-century ago.