David Brooks (behind the Times’s pay-to-play wall) wrote as follows in yesterday’s column: “Only 10 percent of students at an elite college like Cornell are from divorced families, according to a study led by Dean Lillard and Jennifer Gerner.”
According to a study led by me, this would be a little low — or was at Harvard back in the late 1980s. My classes were writing a collective book on college admissions and in the process polled 170 of their classmates. Of these, only 26 — about 15 percent — came from what were then quaintly called “broken homes.”
A more interesting statistic emerged from this question: “One or both parents employed in the field of education, any level, now or for a period of five or more years in the past?” (This last was meant to screen out those who might have dipped a toe into teaching before moving on to law school or investment banking.)
Sixty-three students answered yes, which is 37 percent. And in some of those families, presumably, more than one parent taught. I can conjure up large societal trends from dubious statistics just as well as David Brooks, and can therefore state with complete confidence that America will shortly become, if it isn’t already, a mandarinate.
