Paper

Old Boys' Clubs and Upward Mobility Among the Educational Elite

Michelman, Valerie, Price, Joseph, Zimmerman, Seth D

2021

Overview

This paper studies how exclusive social groups shape upward mobility and whether interactions between low- and high-status peers can integrate the top rungs of the economic and social ladders. Our setting is Harvard in the 1920s and 1930s, where new groups of students arriving on campus encountered a social system centered on exclusive old boys’ clubs. We combine archival and Census records of students’ college lives and careers with a room-randomization design based on a scaled residential integration policy. We first show that high-status students from prestigious private high schools perform worse academically than other students but are more likely to join exclusive campus clubs. Club members go on to earn 32% more than other students and are more likely to work in finance and join country clubs, both characteristic of the era’s elite. The membership premium persists after conditioning on high school, legacy status, and even family. Random assignment to high-status peers increases participation in exclusive college clubs, but overall effects are driven entirely by large gains for private school students. In the long run, a 50 percentile increase in residential peer group status raises the rate at which private school students work in finance by 40% and their membership in adult social clubs by 26%. We conclude that social interactions among the educational elite mediated access to top positions in the post-war United States but did not provide a path to these positions for underrepresented groups. Turning to recent cohorts, we show that while Harvard students differ from the past in their racial, ethnic, and gender composition, the path for high-status students from clubs to finance careers still exists, and elite university students from the highest-income families continue to earn more than others.

• Publisher: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
• Subject: Peers / Private schools / Students / Upward mobility