## Notes from 24 March 2026 [[2026-03-23|← Previous note]] ┃ [[2026-03-25|Next note →]] I came across this fascinating [[Manhattan Institute]] [study](https://manhattan.institute/article/changing-the-choosers-expanding-opportunity-by-diversifying-leadership-selectors?utm_source=LinkedIn&utm_medium=Organic_Social) by [[Andy Smarick]] that quantifies something we know: who gets chosen for elite positions depends heavily on who's doing the choosing. He looks at two cases where we can actually track this (Supreme Court clerkships and White House Fellows) and the numbers are bad. SCOTUS justices from Ivy+ colleges hire 56% of their clerks from Ivy+ colleges, while non-Ivy+ justices hire only 39% from those schools. The gap widens for law school: Ivy+ law graduates on the bench hire 71% from Ivy+ law schools versus 53% for others. What really caught my attention is that Ivy+ justices hire from a narrower pool entirely... their "diversity index" shows they consider candidates from fewer than half the schools that non-Ivy+ justices consider. For White House Fellows (WHF), when the commission has 10 percentage points more Ivy+ members, the fellows selected with Ivy+ degrees jump by 5-7 percentage points. Over a 25-year career, a non-Ivy+ SCOTUS justice will hire 17 more clerks from non-Ivy+ colleges and 22 more from non-Ivy+ law schools than their Ivy+ colleague. Had the WHF commission been 20% Ivy+ instead of the historical 40%, we'd have 125 more fellows from other schools. What makes this more than just credential-counting is Smarick's distinction between "affinity bias" (preferential treatment during selection) and "network effect" (advantages getting to the selection table). He controls for alma mater loyalty - turns out Ivy+ justices aren't just hiring from their own schools but broadly across the Ivy+ universe. Justice Thomas (non-Ivy undergrad) explicitly seeks "kids from regular backgrounds"; Justice Souter (Harvard everything) admitted he wouldn't "dare" hire outside "well-trodden paths" without absolute certainty in references. This is all stupid for many reasons. One of that is that many non-Ivy+ law schools have students in the top 1-2% nationally on LSATs and produce successful state supreme court justices, but SCOTUS justices ignore them. University of Mississippi Law has nine graduates on state supreme courts (third-most in the country) but only one SCOTUS clerk since 1980. Harvard and Yale Law combined? 748 clerks in that same period. This matters for civil service reform because it challenges the meritocracy story. If talent is distributed widely but selection is concentrated narrowly, the problem isn't supply-side (admissions, credentials) but demand-side (who's choosing). Smarick's earlier work showed state-level legal leaders (supreme court justices, attorneys general, top law firm partners) come overwhelmingly from public flagships, not Ivies. So the SCOTUS clerk concentration isn't about Ivy+ inherent superiority; it's about selector bias operating at the federal elite level.