Kids Go To Harvard To Get Jobs, Not To Develop An Ideology

Everyone at Yale thinks they’ll eventually be president. Harvard is no different.

This is worth remembering as Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy questions whether he should allow his daughter to attend Harvard. In Duffy’s words to his daughter, the Ivy League schools “have professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you and corrupt their minds.”

Duffy’s expression of worry amounts to non sequitur. See this opinion piece’s opening. Those smart enough to be accepted at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, and schools like the ones mentioned didn’t get in because they’re malleable, or easily corrupted, but because they’re incredibly ambitious.

Sorry, but the students at elite schools attend them (after spending their pre-teen and teen years working diligently to be admitted to them) to position themselves for the best jobs possible once graduated. Again, they’re powerfully ambitious. And the top corporations very much want to hire the ambitious.

As a 2026 article in the Wall Street Journal indicated, “where you went to college matters again.” Getting more specific, a “2025 survey of more than 150 companies” cited by the Journal “found that 26% were exclusively recruiting from a shortlist of schools.”

Where the best corporations recruit their employees is a market signal, though one conservatives tend to ignore. Invested in the notion reminder that elite schools are out to corrupt young minds on the path to socialistic thought, all too many believe as Duffy does. Though one guesses Duffy was playing for the cameras more than he was expressing a serious view.

Evidence supporting the above claim can be found in the number of prominent conservatives who attended the elite schools supposedly prone to corrupting young minds. Said another way, ambitious conservative parents of ambitious children chant the conservative narrative about elite schools until their children get in.

How else to explain Tom Cotton, Ben Sasse, and George Gilder graduating from Harvard with a strong right lean, not to mention Ron De Santis (Yale), Ted Cruz (Princeton), and Josh Hawley (Stanford)? Take away the conservative grads from the Ivy League and those like it, and you don’t have much in the way of conservative elites to point to. Which is the point.

In addition to elite schools attracting ambitious job seekers, they also attract lots of right wingers. Well, yes. Conservatives tend toward ambition.

In other words, the narrative about elite schools dense with socialist nutjobs is good for feeding the flock, but not serious. And it never was. See conservative historian Steven Hayward’s two-part, and rather brilliant The Age of Reagan books, and his observation that fringe left wingers at Cal-Berkeley were at best 5 percent of the student population.

Wall Street Journal editorial page columnist Matthew Hennessey claims “Kids from conservative families lose their minds at college. Not because the progressive ideas they encounter are irrefutable, but because the social pressure to conform is irresistible.” The bet here is Hennessey could be convinced otherwise, and not just because more than a few of his editorial page colleagues emerged from the Ivy League with right-leaning ideology intact. Figure that Hennessey lives in the New York area: surrounded by intense ambition, Hennessey is by extension surrounded by Ivy League grads.

Back to Duffy, the speculation here is that away from the camera he’s having different conversations about Harvard. Which means the bet here is that Paloma Duffy will accept Harvard’s offer, as she should.

The campus is beautiful, the best corporations aggressively recruit there, plus conservative arguments against Harvard reek of victimhood. And victimhood is a left-wing thing. At least it was.

Originally published on Real Clear Markets.