@marlowe1 Impact is very different from studiousness. That is why George W. Bush, Kennedy and Trump became Presidents and not the people who ran against them. These men were not brilliant as students. The thing that wealthy families bring to the table that is vital to a University is the “likelihood of perpetuating their wealth and success down to their progeny” The reason a Harvard degree has more value than lets say a Chicago degree is not because Harvard provides a better education, it is because it couches every degree that it gives out with an aura of “success” largely built on the shoulders of the “already pedigreed applicants” it recruited in as students. And then there is also a non trivial percentage who become strong contributors in their fields as well, but these accomplished kids were attracted to Harvard in the first place because of the aura built from the recruitment of successful wealthy applicants in the past who made a name for themselves.
That is why Harvard is never going to reject an Obama kid, or a Clinton kid no matter what their studiousness level is. Even Harvard needs that brand name. Celebrity ambassadors matter in higher education. The educational qualifications of these ambassadors is not very relevant, because their success will build an aura for the university associated with them and increase the “perceived value” of every degree it grants
You need a good mix of the strivers as well as the well heeled at a University.
Personally, I would put up with many “Lazy, party-crazy, anti intellectual fellow students from wealthy connected familes studying with me” (as long as they are not the only types or the majority at the school) because there is a high likelihood that this person will use his/her connections to become extremely successful and that in turn will make my association with the same university they went to more practically valuable to me.
You can choose your college in order to do something or be something. If you want to be wealthy and powerful, you go to the college that helps you get that and you send your kids to the same (giving money as needed to make that happen), thus perpetuating that image and protecting that brand. That might make for a mighty generation (or several) of elites but it really doesn’t sound much like “Life of the Mind” to me. Now, why would UChicago - under Nondorf and Zimmer, no less! - send out that marketing pamphlet if all they really wanted to do was attract more wealthy and powerful?
Of course, it TOOK a wealthy and powerful gentleman to create UChicago in the first place. But the Rockefellers and Carnegies of those years seem to have a lot more in common with Gates and Jobs than Obama and Clinton.
@marlowe1 “In my professional life I have gotten to know several generations of some very rich families. The young scions in such families are seldom much inclined to studiousness. They have generally not seen the need to work up a sweat about that sort of thing or else are not really capable of it. They are not the sort who seek a challenging academic environment even if they have, as they seldom do, any real curiosity about the underlying subjects of study.”
I disagree. I think the children of the rich are inclined to studiousness at pretty much the exact same percentages as everyone else. Some are hard working, some are not. At my kids’ prep school, some of the superstar kids are super wealthy, and some of the slackers are super wealthy. Two years ago the top student in the class was from a billionaire family, and probably never needed to work a day in his life if he didn’t want to. He really wanted to. He went to Stanford, and had his choice among several super elite schools.
Now if UChicago can entice a larger share of those rare kids, it will serve it well in the long run - and it doesn’t have to lower the admissions standards to do it. They have to continue to make it more appealing to the top kids who have choices - some of whom are very wealthy.
There are serious intellects amongst the super rich too. Chicago has to be more of a destination for them.
What amazes me is that, for all it’s history, almost no super rich families chose uchicago. Yes it was an unpleasant place, but really? Per @JHS - it looks like the pritzkers are a Chicago family for college, but besides that? You’d think just by being a top school there would be at least a handful of these types!
@JBStillFlying - let’s see if Bill gates son actually attends. Going on a college visit could mean nothing.
Also, I’d prefer the other way around - Chicago keeps its tough standards for the super rich, but maybe goes a bit easier on the very poor - And uses the super rich donations to build more bridge programs for the economically strapped students.
To have closer to no big legacy families as a top school is surprising.
(Btw, want to know where Bill gates eldest child went to college? Stanford. I wonder how high Chicago was on her list?)
Stanford had been a great place for the wealthy and powerful in the Western US for decades before breaking out on the national scene - its place among the top of the elites is well-earned but relatively new when compared to HYP. Highly doubt they have the number of multi-generational mucky-mucks you tend to see at the Ivys, although in terms of generating leaders across a broad spectrum of fields - including athletics - it must be near the top.
Neither Harvard nor Duke comes up as schools that the Gates kids have even looked at. And no bong-hits at Brown, either. Tend to think this has more to do with the intelligence of those kids and their parents than anything else.
Jobs dropped out of Reed (often compared to UChciago and for some reason we met a lot of kids from this area considering both schools) but sadly, at least one of his kids went on to Harvard.
@pupflier I have no trouble in giving people of achievement their due. I just don’t find many such people getting there through birth, and I refuse to buy in to dynastic fetishes. You and I perhaps have different anecdotal evidence regarding the qualities of the children of the rich, but I believe a proper statistical analysis would better bear out my experience than yours. Someone on this board might be able to direct us to the evidence. I did, however, consult a book now some decades out of date by an author whose political predilections I expect you would share: George Gilder, “Wealth and Poverty” (1981). A few takeaways from pages 56-59 of that book:
“The receipt of a legacy, it turns out, often erodes the qualities of entrepreneurship that are needed to perpetuate it. Spending turns out to be far easier than choosing and maintaining those select forms of capital with yields greater than their costs.”
“In future years the members of such families will remain well off, but they will not command the heights of the system or constitute a significant concentration of wealth in a multitrillion-dollar economy. In America, one can say with assurance, the scions of the rich only rarely themselves get richer, though they are often replaced by yet more successful families from lower echelons of income.”
“Rich families face over time a series of fortuities that are sure to bring them down rather rapidly. As the money is passed along, the laws of probability gain in influence and the capabilities of the managers tend to decline. In general, the great fortunes are certain to rise and fall more in accord with the laws of probability, and entropy, than with those of compound interest.”
It’s only natural that the rich and distinguished want to perpetuate their status through their children. By all means let them send their decorative if less talented progeny to Harvard. Let flunkies in the Endowment and Gift-Giving bureaucracies of these places cosset their darlings in hopes that papa will write a fat check. Harvard is good at that sort of thing, as Cue keeps telling us. Let them play that game. I want to see Chicago admit only the best and the brightest and give them the most strenuous education a democracy has to offer. Some of them might end up making some dough and giving it to Chicago. That would be the proper way to get it.
Yadda, yadda. The problem with @marlowe1 's theory is that sometimes it’s true, and sometimes it isn’t. Bill Gates, for example, was a child of wealth and privilege who somehow managed to avoid the inevitable decline in his family’s fortunes. Here in Philadelphia, we have the case of Brian Roberts, who was handed control of a substantial company on a silver platter, and turned it into a globe spanning empire. (His oldest brother, by the way, who wanted no part of the family business, is a respected – and very wealthy – university professor.) The Bass family that has been very generous to Yale is another example. If you cultivate a few families and one of them hits, it pays for a lot of misses.
@Cue7 I have said before that I know several people who are current undergraduates or young alumni at Chicago who come from families with substantial wealth. Not Pritzker or Gates wealth, perhaps, but solid high-8-to-mid-9-figure wealth. I suspect Chicago is doing fine on this score.
@JHS - that’s great - if the information is publicly accessible (And most families with major net worth have Wikipedia pages) can you name the families?
As an example, just off the top of my head, here are power families with multi generational ties to Penn, and all this info is publicly accessible: trumps, bidens, huntsmans, perelmans, wynns (hotel and casino magnates), David Montgomery phillies owner, sixers owner Joshua Harris, tatas and mittals (Indian billionaire families), rendells (pa governor) roberts (comcast), cohen (comcast)…
And this is just off the top of my head!
What are the known Chicago ones? You named the pritzkers, but no one else really with multi generational ties.
(And find is all relative, @JHS - How would you say Chicago compares not even with the tippy top, but with the likes of Penn, Columbia, cornell, etc? Those are its supposed peers)
@Cue7 Another two very big ones at Penn are the Lauder (of Estee Lauder fortune) and the Moelis families.
Just an observation here, it comes down to whether Chicago wants to model its more like Harvard and other ivies in that regard or more like MIT. Both are viable options but the former is probably safer/easier.
@Penn95 - ah, you bring up a great point with the Lauders!
@JHS and others - here are the Lauders’ connections to UPenn: Joseph and Estee Lauder had two sons, Ronald and Leonard. Ronald and Leonard both went to Penn Undergrad (Wharton).
Leonard Lauder had two sons, William and Gary. They both went to Penn undergrad (Wharton).
Ronald Lauder had two daughters, Jane and Aerin. Aerin went to Penn undergrad, and Jane was the sole member of the Lauder clan who did NOT attend Penn - she was the underachiever who went to Stanford undergrad.
So, for the Lauder family, of a total of 6 eligible Lauders to attend Penn, 5 did. This is to say nothing of the extended Lauder clan - who I suspect have many more connections to UPenn.
I could present similar info on the Perelmans, Huntsmans, etc.
Who are the comparable Chicago families? The Pritzkers don’t have nearly the same brand loyalty to Chicago - and same with the Crowns, Rockefellers, etc.
And note, I haven’t even bothered to present data from the tippy top schools. Penn is nice, but it’s no Harvard or Princeton when it comes to power families.
Actually, I don’t know that you are going to find a lot of “power families” where over 80% of eligible members attended Harvard. across two generations (unless you are talking about only two or three people). Penn is meaningfully larger than Harvard; it has more room to stash people. And 20-30 years ago, its admissions were much more flexible. Although . . . I have friends where over two generations 5/6 eligibles went to Harvard (the sixth went to Swarthmore). They aren’t a “power” family at all – a lawyer and a minister with 2 BAs, and a rare MD/MDiv between them, and four athletically recruitable kids.
Sorry I don’t want to give further info on the Chicago kids. They are not necessarily associated with household-name families, and in one case where there was sort of a famous grandfather, you would have to know the family very well to connect the kid to a maternal grandfather. In some cases I have reason to believe that the kids did not know the full extent of their family’s wealth when they went to college. They weren’t taking private jets to St. Martin for winter break.
@JHS - the Lauders seem especially and unusually loyal to Penn, so they are an outlier. There is no hard math on this, but I think if you have at least a smattering of eligible candidates from a certain family, that qualifies as good loyalty. (I don’t even want to delve into Harvard or Princeton because I think the results would wow/scare me, but I imagine there are LOTS of power families with deep connections to those schools. You don’t have to hit the 80% mark - but at Chicago, I’d take even 20%!)
As far as I know, outside the Rickett family, even families that strongly supported Chicago would only rarely send their children there for college. For the Pritzkers, for example, only one or two of the clan attended Chicago’s college, right? And for the Crowns, Rockefellers, etc., I don’t think ANY did…
It’s just surprising because, yes, for as unpleasant as Chicago’s college used to be, you’d think there would at least be a FEW families with strong (and reciprocated) loyalty to the school - but I can’t really find any.