IF ROME’S oligarchs could have travelled to the future, they might have learned a trick or two from the US Ivy League. It is hard to think of a better system of elite perpetuation than that practised by America’s top universities. Last week the US Supreme Court ended affirmative action in US higher education – a ruling mourned by the heads of each of the eight Ivy League schools. Dartmouth even offered counselling to traumatised students. An ancient Roman might have thought something radical had changed. Little could be further from the truth. 

Of the 31 million Americans aged between 18 and 24, just 68,000 are Ivy League schools undergraduates – about a fifth of a per cent. Of these, a varying ratio are non-white beneficiaries of affirmative action. Many of those are from privileged black or Hispanic backgrounds, as opposed to Chicago’s South Side or the wastelands of Detroit. That is the basis on which the Ivy League lays claim to being a deliverer of social change. It is an optical illusion. In that respect, the Supreme Court has done America a favour. Any disruption to this status quo is a plus.

But it is unlikely to trigger the soul-searching America needs. The US debate remains stubbornly monopolised by the ethnic breakdown of the tiny number of students who win the Ivy League lottery. The 19 million or so of those 31 million young Americans who do not progress beyond high school, and the roughly 12 million who go to less elite colleges, barely feature. Whatever tweaks the Ivy League has to make to keep its diversity ratios after last week’s ruling are thus largely irrelevant to the 99.8 per cent that will never get there.