There has always been a divide between the haves and the have nots, but it’s never been this extreme – on campus or in the world
Congratulations, you get into Harvard Business School (HBS), arguably the most elite graduate school in the world. Your journey there likely involved sacrifices and lots of hard work, especially if you had to scrape together the tuition fees ($ 50,000 a year is the going rate) by yourself, but you made it into the cool club. Now you get to rub shoulders with top scholars, not to mention many future business and political leaders. But did the university forget to mention that you will likely be made to feel like a second-class citizen?
This, apparently, is the experience for many students who make it into Ivy League institutions without the assistance of a trust fund or contributions from the bank of mom and dad. Responding to a recent New York Times story that focused on the school’s efforts to achieve gender equity, many students and alumni pointed out that class divisions are the bigger problem.
It can’t be much fun for students who earned their place in a top school on merit to find themselves excluded from the power players like those who get to join the “Section X” society where only the ultra privileged are welcome. This brush with inequality could be the best thing that ever happened for future HBS graduates, however, should they choose to put their experience to good use.
The inequality that is a “thing now” in the business school at Harvard (among other top institutions) is also a major thing in the real world. A follow up New York Times story quoted a reader, who identified himself as Ken H, as saying that in the 1970s when he attended HBS the tone at the school was “downright egalitarian” and that flashing money around was considered to be in bad taste. He went on to make the important point that “maybe what has changed isn’t so much HBS, but America”. There has always been (and probably always will be) a divide between the haves and the have nots, but it’s never been as extreme as it is today, nor have the consequences of the division been so widely felt.
Who better to address this inequality, however, than the future business and political leaders who get a taste of what social exclusion is like while they are studying at elite colleges.
Much has been written about how income inequality has increased exponentially in the United States since the 1970s, but just to illustrate how much worse things have gotten, here are a few choice statistics: in 1965, a typical CEO was paid around 20 times what an average employee earned. Today they are paid nearly 273 times the average employee. Meanwhile during the same period, wage rates for almost everyone else out the very top stagnated or declined, and the bottom 20% (whose incomes decreased by a whopping 30%) were hit the hardest.
So now we have a situation where the top 1% of Americans control 43% of the country’s financial wealth while the bottom 80% control a meagre 7%. Put simply, the rich have gotten a lot richer at the expense of everyone else. No wonder then that this staggering inequality has crept into the most elite of institutions where members of an exclusive “Section X” get to jet off to Iceland for the weekend and throw lavish parties that only members of their own social class are invited to, leaving many of their less well off class mates to feel like they are missing out on important networking opportunities.
But here’s the thing, even though some students at HBS and other elite colleges may feel (with good reason) that they will not enjoy the same easy route to becoming a master of the universe as “Section X” types, they are still extremely well positioned to become the business and political leaders of the future. Very few HBS graduates are likely to end up living on food stamps, but they could do a lot, if they so choose, to help those who earn so little that they need food stamps to survive.
There is a growing movement to address wage inequality in America, as evidenced by the wave of strikes by fast food workers and Walmart employees, but it’s mostly a bottom up effort. How great would it be if future HBS graduates were to exploit their own brush with injustice to tackle the systemic injustice that prevents so many Americans from getting ahead?
Corporate boards and many of the top jobs at Fortune 500 companies tend to be occupied by the alumni of elite universities. Many sitting members of congress also graduated from top colleges such as Harvard, Stanford or Yale. This means that many of the HBS students of today, even those who feel that their opportunities are being compromised by elitism, are likely to end up in positions of power.
Imagine if they used that power to level the playing field – by promoting efforts to close the wage gap, helping improve education opportunities for everyone and mandating that the minimum wage be a living wage – instead of maintaining the status quo. That would be a far better way for students who are genuinely offended by class differences to exact revenge on the ultra-wealthy than moaning about not getting invited to the all the best parties.
Comment is free | theguardian.com Great, Harvard Business School finally cares about inequality. Will they do anything about it? | Sadhbh Walshe
