In a recent letter to The Daily Princetonian, Susan Patton exhorted current female students to lock up a future husband in college. Because men frequently marry below their intellectual and educational level, as Patton says, smart Princeton women occupy a precarious place in marriage market. "You will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you," Patton wrote.
Patton's letter reveals more about the generation to which she belongs than the one to which she gave advice. Her letter implicitly privileges monogamy over hookups, dating over dance floor make-outs and finding a spouse over screwing around. In the Ivy League of the 1970s, her claim might have held water. Nowadays? Not so much. Sociologists Elizabeth Armstong and Laura Hamilton found, in a series of studies on college campuses, that the hookup culture operates as a vehicle for female empowerment. Women cannily use hookups as a delaying tactic, gaining a taste for real-world relationships while still prioritizing schoolwork and their friendships.
These findings were more pronounced at prestigious universities, where ambitious women operated like "savvy headhunters," frequently choosing lighter hookups over the time-sucking intensity of a relationship. Patton misses the big picture: Princeton women do not suffer from a lack of options. They suffer from a lack of time. Increasingly, and thankfully, they are choosing to avoid romantic entanglement and instead maximize personal success.
Princeton women would likely only disagree with the urgency of Susan Patton's claim: They still plan on marrying Princeton men, or their rough equals, just not yet. Patton's letter relies on the misguided, Mad Men-era notion of rich, intelligent men marrying their secretaries. The world no longer works that way. Doctors marry doctors, a Goldman Sachs banker marries a Bain consultant and so on. Increasingly, the best educated marry the best educated in a phenomenon known as "assortative mating." While this phenomenon is undoubtedly positive most notably, as economist Gary Burtless points out, as evidence of increasing labor market opportunities for women over time the implicit rationale behind it might not be.
Ross Douthat effectively (and a bit too glibly) pointed out this motivation in a recent New York Times column. Obviously Ivy League students know they should marry one another, he argued it is the best way to entrench our advantages for our children. Douthat recalls urban theorist Richard Florida's research, which illustrates the retreat of our educated elite into coastal enclaves, such as San Francisco, the New York suburbs and Boston, and the subsequent isolation of the rest of the country. Educated people do not need to be told to almost exclusively marry and socialize with one another; they are already doing it.
Patton's column was roundly criticized, Douthat says, for laying bare the implicit benefit of Ivy league schools: networking. Elite universities serve as vehicles for connecting bright minds, not enhancing them, and "the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class." This point combines devastatingly with Florida's research: as the educated elite cloister themselves away at Dartmouth and in Greenwich, Conn., at Stanford and in Menlo Park, Calif., they drive innovation and discovery but such dynamism mostly benefits their communities and not the country as a whole.
Douthat, sadly, is not wrong. Dartmouth's historic role matches his critique almost exactly: an educational institution that, intentional or not, preserved the benefits of the already well-educated for the next generation. Changes over the last 30 years, such as the advent of coeducation and increasing student diversity, have somewhat ended this good old boy's club. Nonetheless, our school remains disturbingly socio-economically stratified. The Greek system, where the "best" houses require the highest dues, might be the best example.
We should not allow Douthat's critique to be right in the future. He snarkily ends his piece by criticizing affirmative action, arguing that all it does is cosmetically represent the American population at schools like Dartmouth while still perpetuating existing upper class advantages. Maybe he is right. Instead of replicating and reinforcing existing social hierarchies, Dartmouth should break them down. We should all use our liberal arts education to escape from our preexisting bubbles and challenge ourselves. There is no easy solution. But let us not allow ourselves to fall into that bubble, that malaise, of which Douthat writes and Patton praises. We're better than that. We're not Princeton.
