Nate Knows Nada

Rhodes Scholarship winners were announced yesterday, and unsurprisingly, Harvard had the most of any school in the nation.  Of the thirty-two winners, four are Harvard students.

Students from public universities comprised six winners overall, and two of those were from the US Air Force Academy.  So the number of non-service academy, public university winners in the whole country is equal to the number from Harvard alone.

Harvard students are good, but they’re not so good as to be heads and shoulders above the combined student bodies of the best public institutions.  The best kids at the public universitites are equal in talent, achievement, and potential as the kids at Harvard.

My guess is that students at public universities are just not getting the support and advice needed to fare well in a competition like the Rhodes.  When I applied from UC Davis to the big scholarships like this, I was the first person that most of the administration could remember who had applied for some of these scholarships, and as much as they tried, the faculty and administrators who helped me were unsure about how to do that.

There’s probably also a bit of academic nepotism here.  The members of the selection committees are more likely to have gone to the prestigious private institutions, and (not maliciously) they are more plugged into that network of people and schools, knowing more about them than they would about Berkeley, Michigan, Virginia, UCLA, and such (the cream of the public schools).

But there’s a serious bias here.  What happens is that kids like me, who went to the public universities because they were affordable when the private Ivies were not, not only don’t get the advantages that come from smaller, more individually focused schools (such as many of the private colleges and universities are) but also miss out on being considered in the running for prizes like the Rhodes or even from getting sufficient advice on how to begin being competitive.

Yesterday’s results remind us that the Rhodes Scholarship has a long way to go before one can consider it meritocratic — it still reeks more of privilege and connection than acheivement and  merit.

And don’t even get me started on where Rhodes’ money came from…. *grin*