The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for leaders, and leadership, the officials of the Ivy League believed, was not a simple matter of academic brilliance. “Should our goal be to select a student body with the highest possible proportions of high-ranking students, or should it be to select, within a reasonably high range of academic ability, a student body with a certain variety of talents, qualities, attitudes, and backgrounds?” Wilbur Bender asked. To him, the answer was obvious. If you let in only the brilliant, then you produced bookworms and bench scientists: you ended up as socially irrelevant as the University of Chicago (an institution Harvard officials looked upon and shuddered).

I have never attended a US university – my one experience of the system was a seminar I participated in at Yale two and a half years ago – but the description of the hidden motivations behind university admissions systems sounds very similar to the factors that I know operate for Cambridge, where I did my own first two degrees. Of course, academic ability plays a part; but looking through the alumni directory of my own college, I am struck by how many of my fellow graduates have gone into jobs in the City of London, be it finance or law, or else into further academic research. The first category of graduate is important for the sake of future donations, in that they have the money and have it nearby, and the second sort of graduate is important for the sake of prestige, in that the metrics for assessing academic success are drawn up by academics and therefore depend a lot on academic activity. Clare College also has a bias towards choral music.

Other measures of achievement don’t seem to matter so much. It’s striking that the only two twentieth century students of Clare College who became world-class figures in philosophy or literature – Thomas Merton and Siegfried Sassoon  – both failed to finish their courses; let’s hope that China Mieville bucks that trend. (Significantly, we did better in the sciences – David Attenborough,  Andrew Wiles,  James Watson – and music –  Cecil Sharp,  John Rutter, and (though I think he too failed to graduate)  Richard Stilgoe.)

More parochially, sitting in my office in Brussels dealing daily with highly intelligent, well educated and very skillful people in and around the European institutions, it is very noticeable that the Oxbridge graduates are very few among them. I would say that, excluding British diplomats, over half of my professional contacts here who have been to a British university have attended LSE. If Oxbridge actually cares about the EU it’s not at all visible.

But of course, intelligence and success may well not be linked as closely as is often assumed. Looking at politics, as I often do, Jeremy Paxman points out that the three British prime ministers of the twentieth century with the best academic qualifications all failed in office and Steve Chapman pointed out five years ago in Slate that while the Democrats tended to run obviously smarter presidential candidates than the Republicans, it doesn’t necessarily do them much good, either in terms of winning elections, or in terms of having successful presidencies once the election has been won (poor old Jimmy Carter being the most obvious case in point). To be a good politician, brains are sometimes a drawback; what is much more important is to connect with people as a potential leader, not a thinker.

Returning to the world of commercial success, and the article about Harvard, I was struck by the research finding that:

Male athletes, despite their lower S.A.T. scores and grades, and despite the fact that many of them are members of minorities and come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than other students, turn out to earn a lot more than their peers. Apparently, athletes are far more likely to go into the high-paying financial-services sector, where they succeed because of their personality and psychological makeup.