Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Biden is aiming increasingly personal and sarcastic jabs at Trump

Eric Adams’s condescending dismissal of the ‘children’ at Columbia

Election 2024 live updates: Trump holds rallies in Wisconsin, Michigan during court break

Use these 6 points to say no to a college you and your kid can’t afford

How this new rule protects retirement savers from costly advice

Borrowers, don’t miss this important student loan forgiveness deadline

Adaptive adventures are making national parks more inclusive

Man arrested at Yellowstone for allegedly kicking bison while drunk

Southwest passengers now get a $75 voucher for big flight disruptions

How to make the most of Passport DC’s free embassy tours

Where to watch the Kentucky Derby in D.C.

Chance to move over .500 slips away as Nats lose to reigning champs

Carolyn Hax: Too late to accept a decade-old apology, accidentally left unread?

I coach my son’s sports team. Why is he so disrespectful during practice?

Miss Manners: How to decline donation requests at checkout

Biden’s internet-for-all program needs Musk’s help

The tech billionaires who helped ban TikTok want to write AI rules for Trump

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

I learned to heal my sadness by cradling dying chickens 

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

Riding the rails with hobos and crust punks

In photos: Violence erupts at campuses as activists and counterprotesters clash

Drone video shows trapped baby orca in B.C. lagoon

A murder plot that cannot be ignored: India must come clean at last

How to confront antisemitism, deal with protests — and respect free speech

Is student loan debt an emergency? Take our quiz.

UnitedHealth grew very big. Now, some lawmakers want to chop it down.

The new face of flooding

How celebrity tequilas are changing the very nature of tequila

France shows its anger on May Day ahead of Paris Olympics

One photo, one night in Rafah

Is Bougainville the next battleground between China and the U.S.?

Trump hush money trial live updates: Judge to hold hearing on alleged gag order violations

See more coverage in your recommendations

Get the weekly Campaign Moment newsletter

Set alerts for major election developments

Election 2024

The Campaign Moment newsletter

Politics alerts

Ted Shaffrey

Allow me to get something out of the way, right off the bat: Ivy League. What’s more, I should add, Ivy League. And of course, Ivy League. “Ivy League?” you might ask. To which I offer a curt response: “Ivy League.”

Now that I’ve piqued your interest, let us begin.

Sign up for How To Read This Chart, a weekly data newsletter from Philip Bump

There are few things in which the media and the sorts of people who spend a lot of time focused on the media show more attention than the machinations of Ivy League universities. The most popular story that could ever be written by a journalist for a journalist would be a story about journalism at an Ivy League university.

There are a few reasons. One is that lots of top-tier journalists attended these universities, just as members of the top-tier of other institutions and organizations did. And while it is probably not technically true that every Ivy diploma requires a seminar course in navel-gazing, it might be technically true. Ivy League people invest a lot of money and energy in the Ivy League and in higher education in particular and, as such, they have a more-robust-than-usual interest in the goings-on within the world of higher education and at Ivies specifically. So, you get lots of fulmination about Ivies and college, and what’s happening there which is generally offered through the lens of “this is important because these people will leave college and influence society” but generally reflects the lens of “this is important because I left that college and influenced society.”

This will seem like sour grapes coming from someone who attended a state university (a large university in Ohio), but that plays only a small role in these observations. It is obviously true that those who attend Ivy League universities tend to be smart; they are probably smarter on average than the attendees of other collegiate groupings. But it is also stipulated that the prevalence of Ivy Leaguers in the upper echelon of American society is heavily a function of the navel-gazing, the informal networks of Ivy Leaguers promoted by Ivy Leaguers who view the Ivy League as inherently important. An Ivy degree is the mark of an official Beanie Baby, for those who insist that their Beanie Babies come only from Ty.

Over the past week, the flip side of the elite obsession with the Ivy League <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/12/06/white-house-university-presidents-antisemitism-genocide/?itid=ap_azipaybarah" target=_blank>has been prominent</a>. House Republicans, including some who attended Ivy League schools, invited several college presidents to testify on the subject of antisemitism. The presidents, including those from <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/12/12/claudine-gay-remains-harvard-president-antisemitism/" target=_blank>Harvard University</a> and the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/12/09/penn-president-magill-antisemitism-harvard-mit/" target=_blank>University of Pennsylvania</a>, unwisely offered constrained, academic responses to loaded questions, triggering a broad outcry. The outcry was powered to no small degree by disdain, performative and otherwise, for the elite institutions those administrators represent — but it was outcry all the same. The U-Penn. president has since resigned, facing <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/governance/executive-leadership/2023/12/11/missteps-antisemitism-prompt-penns-president-resign" target=_blank>criticism</a> that predated the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/israel-hamas-war/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">war in Gaza</a>.

This controversy involved the presidents of schools that educate <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/12/08/higher-education-desantis-florida-ivies/" target=_blank>57,000 students</a>, about three-tenths of a percent of the total number of college students <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_301.20.asp?current=yes" target=_blank>enrolled last year</a>. But these were elite schools, including Ivies, and the presidents had stumbled on a potent issue in the public conversation. So, over the past seven days, <a href="https://api.gdeltproject.org/api/v2/summary/summary?d=iatv&t=summary&k=%28%22ivy+league%22+or+harvard+or+penn%29&ts=1w&fs=station%3ACNN&fs=station%3AFOXNEWS&fs=station%3AMSNBC&fdr=month&svt=zoom&svts=zoom&swvt=zoom&ssc=yes&sshc=yes&swc=yes&stcl=yes&c=1" target=_blank>more than 1.1 percent</a> of 15-second blocks aired on CNN mentioned the schools or the Ivy League. On Fox News, it was more than 2 percent — with at least <a href="https://api.gdeltproject.org/api/v2/summary/summary?d=iatv&t=summary&k=%28%22ivy+league%22+or+harvard+or+penn%29&ts=1w&fs=station%3ACNN&fs=station%3AFOXNEWS&fs=station%3AMSNBC&fdn=raw&fdr=month&svt=zoom&svts=zoom&swvt=zoom&ssc=yes&sshc=yes&swc=yes&stcl=yes&c=1" target=_blank>2,000 mentions</a> of “Ivy League,” “Harvard” or “Penn.”

I was curious how this level of attention compared with the footprint of the schools themselves. What percentage of Americans are enrolled in Ivy League schools? How many are Ivy graduates?

This is trickier to determine than it may seem because there isn’t good data on where college graduates earned their degrees over time. We know how many students are enrolled at Ivy League schools and how many college students there have been historically, but parsing out Ivy graduates (much less attendees) for past decades is tricky.

I began by trying to pull data by decade as far back as I could go. Brown University — which is an Ivy League school, probably to your surprise — has <a href="https://oir.brown.edu/institutional-data/factbooks/historical-student-enrollment" target=_blank>an extensive history</a> available. It came first alphabetically, so I was optimistic. But the other seven schools often didn’t. So I shifted my plan. My new goal was to figure out what percentage of degrees were granted to Ivy Leaguers, which would then allow me to estimate the percentage of past graduates who attended Ivies.

Through a combination of searching Google and the Internet Archive, I pulled enrollment numbers for the 2019-2020 year for all of the schools. That year, there were about 138,000 students enrolled at those eight institutions. Across all <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_301.20.asp" target=_blank>3,982 postsecondary schools</a> the following year (that is, post-high school), about 19.6 million people were enrolled. The density of Ivy Leaguers, then, was about 0.7 percent. But that doesn’t include previous graduates. In fact, it doesn’t even tell us much about how many people obtained degrees from those schools that year.

I found data on the number of bachelor’s degrees granted by four of the schools; on average, 12.9 percent of those enrolled received such degrees in that school year. This was higher than the national number of 10.4 percent, but in the interest of erring on the side of generosity (and with the understanding that Ivy League students usually graduate with degrees), I assumed it held across the eight schools. So if 12.9 percent of the Ivies’ 137,600 enrolled students got degrees, that’s about 17,800 degrees, or 0.87 percent of all degrees issued. I had my estimate.

The Census Bureau <a href="https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045222" target=_blank>estimates</a> that about 34.3 percent of the population ages 25 and older had at least a bachelor’s degree in the 2018 to 2022 period. Since those 25 and older are about 69 percent of the population, that means the college-educated group is about 23.5 percent of the population.

Perhaps this seems low to you. That’s probably because the rate of college attendance increased steadily for the latter half of the 20th century, meaning that younger Americans are more likely to go to college than were older Americans. Overlap that with the fact that only <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_302.10.asp" target=_blank>about two-thirds</a> of high school graduates attended college in recent years and the large population under 18, and you see where the number comes from.

Now we do our estimate. If we assume that the 0.87 percentage holds across time — which certainly isn’t true, but it’s the best we’ve got — then that means that 0.21 percent of the U.S. population has an Ivy League degree.

There are a lot of caveats that apply. The most obvious is that these are rough estimates. Another is that a lot of those degrees were issued to international students. A third is that this assumes there are no other factors that differentiate Ivy League students from other Americans, which probably isn’t true. For example, given the cost of an Ivy League education and the post-degree salary benefits, it’s likely that Ivy League graduates live longer, making up a greater percentage of the older population than the younger population.

But you get the point. Ivy League graduates (which is most of those who attended an Ivy League school, it’s safe to say) constitute only a fraction of the population — certainly far less than you might have assumed given how much attention those schools receive.

It’s also possible that I’m missing some important qualifiers here. After all, I only went to a lowly state university.

The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America

Ohio State University

Philip Bump is a Post columnist based in New York. He writes the newsletter <a href="https://wapo.st/3m3QTiy">How To Read This Chart</a> and is the author of <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/696653/the-aftermath-by-philip-bump/">The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America</a>.

Philip Bump

Putting the media obsession with the Ivy League into context

the-washington-post

Yale University

Biden administration

The Fix

The 202s

Polling

Democracy in America

Balance of Power Pair

U.S. House Aggregate

U.S. Senate Aggregate

Politics

washpost

prism://prism.query/site-articles-only,/politics&limit=20

Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter.

Post Politics from The Washington Post is the source for political news headlines, in-depth politics coverage and political opinion, plus breaking news on the biden administration and White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, elections and more.

Ivy League, Ivy League, Ivy League? Ivy League — Ivy League.

Putting the media obsession with elite university machinations into context