Colleges across the country brag about how selective they are. The percent acceptance is one criterion used in college rankings. The lower the percentage of students accepted by the school, the better it must be.
Selectivity then triggers a chain reaction. Employers want graduates from ranked schools and thus selectivity becomes a factor in career opportunities. The U.S. Supreme Court appointments typically come from two law schools.
But how effective is selectivity as an accurate measure for judging the caliber of talent? Consider the following seven names. You may be familiar with many of them.
- Patrick Henry: Member of the Continental Congress, Governor of Virginia, lawyer who had 1100 cases in his career.
- Robert Storey: President of the American Bar Association for two years in the 1950s.
- Stephen Douglas: Famous for his debates with Abraham Lincoln, an attorney in Illinois.
- John Jay: First Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
- John Marshall: Supreme Court Justice.
- Samuel Chase: U.S. Senator, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
- Clarence Darrow: One of our nation’s most famous lawyers.
With such a prestigious list of attorneys, you might be inclined to assume that our nation’s most prestigious and selective universities educated them. But that would be wrong. In fact, none of the above ever attended law school.
Why have we become a society that makes judgments about a person’s worth by where they attended college? That’s a measure that says nothing about the individual. It doesn’t measure initiative, character, emotional stability, inventiveness, perseverance, or any of the many important traits for success. What talent in our society is going underdeveloped because of these assessments based on a pursuit of selectivity?
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“Selectivity is just Jim Crow under another name.”–Unknown