Prestige Moves South

The rise of Vanderbilt and the SEC, the coming population bust, and more in this week's digest.

Geographic inequality has been a persistent feature of the American landscape for some time. The highest level economic activities have concentrated in a handful of superstar cities on the coasts. Growth has concentrated largely in Sunbelt boomtowns. Many places and regions remain left behind. While Trump’s rise was heavily fueled by cultural issues, geographic inequality, which contributes to economic inequality at the individual level, was a factor as well.

New York magazine had an interesting story on the rise of Vanderbilt as a prestige university that helps shed light on this. It’s an illustration of the compounding geographic advantage of the South over less dynamic areas of the country.

Back in the 1980s, people and businesses moved to the South because it was cheap. The facilities companies located there were often back office operations facilities and the like. Over time, that compounded and the South began to draw more headquarters, with cities like Houston among the top centers for Fortune 500 HQs. Now, the South’s rise has started compounding into growing prestige as well. You can think about ultra-wealth and high finance pouring into South Florida, top Silicon Valley players like Elon Musk going to Austin, and non-country music celebrities choosing to base themselves in Nashville.

The steep rise in the desirability of SEC schools is part of this. Vanderbilt is a bit unusual in the conference because it is a private school, but as a case study it is still instructive.

Over the last few years, Vandy, as it’s affectionately known, has become one of the most desired and admired schools in the country. At a time when only 42 percent of Americans say they have a lot of confidence in higher education, and as other schools face a spate of crises — an increasingly antagonistic White House, the existential threat of AI, administrative uncertainty about how to handle student protests — the university has emerged as a bit of an apolitical fantasy land. It accepted just 2.9 percent of regular-decision applicants, and although its overall acceptance rate won’t be available until late August, a university official told me it’s expected to be about 4.8 percent, which would make Vanderbilt almost as hard to get into as Yale was last year. The school consistently ranks in the mid-teens in the U.S. News & World Report’s annual lists of best colleges.

The author notes that this is a sea change from when he attended there:

But this reputational makeover has been in the works for decades. I know this because I graduated from Vanderbilt in 2004, back when 38 percent of high-schoolers who applied to Vandy got in — and watched from afar as the university spent the next 20 years becoming fancier, less southern, and considerably more selective. It had a plan to become popular, and that plan worked.

As with trying to aggressively lure companies, Vanderbilt aggressively targeted high prestige students from Northeastern prep schools, as well as top Jewish talent:

The brunt of Vanderbilt’s recruitment strategy was focused on the Northeast, specifically on high schools that sent a lot of students to Ivies. “I’d been visiting those boarding schools when I was at Brown: Andover, Exeter, etc. So I started doing that,” Gee said. He also began “targeting Jewish students,” as he told The Wall Street Journal in 2002, explaining that “Jewish students … make a university a much more habitable place in terms of intellectual life” and were key components of his “elite strategy” of turning Vanderbilt into a direct competitor of the Ivy League.

This is an inversion of the midcentury era. Instead of putting quotas on Jewish students, they are actively recruiting more. It was a smart strategy.

Part of its plan to lure them in involved getting rid of Southern identity elements that might be considered retrograde:

Not everyone was comfortable going to school in the South. “My grandparents were like, ‘It’s not the same down there. You need to be careful,’ ” Taylor Thompson, who is Black and grew up in Chicago, told me. So Vanderbilt became less southern. In 2002, the university stripped the word Confederate from the name of one of its dormitories. “We had a growing Black population, and a number of students were uncomfortable staying in the hall, so I said, ‘Okay, let’s rename it,’ ” Gee told me. The decision caused an outcry among a certain type of white southerner — in fact, Gee says he made the name change without consulting the university’s full board of trustees because he believed it would disapprove.

People think that the South is the last region of the country that still has a historic, authentic culture, or that it is steeped in Lost Cause-ism or clinging to its past in other ways. In my observation, it’s basically the opposite. No region is more ready to jettison its past in order to make more money (or win football games). Try getting people to change something in New England or the Midwest and you can really see the difference. The extreme generic sprawl of Southern cities shows how unsentimental they are when it comes to this. The battles over Confederate monuments and the like show this dumping of history in progress - and the preservationist arguments usually seem to turn out to be a minority position.

There were many other initiatives the school undertook, such as reducing the role of the Greek system in campus life. I can’t possibly do justice to all their strategies and the entire article here, but I do want to also highlight their push to open campuses in elite coastal locations like San Francisco, New York, and West Palm Beach.

The university announced that it would invest $300 million in athletics, redesigned its logo, and committed to opening four additional campuses that would extend the university’s reach beyond Nashville. Last year, it finalized a 99-year $44.3 million lease with New York’s General Theological Seminary, the Episcopal Church’s oldest institution of this type, taking over its campus in Chelsea….To expand its presence in the tech scene, Vanderbilt also purchased the campus currently occupied by California College of the Arts, a private art school in San Francisco that was running out of money. A third campus was planned for West Palm Beach (it’s for people who want to go into finance or aerospace).

This article shows the growth and prestige flywheels that the South has operating. Nashville, pretty much a backwater 35 years ago, became a hot city. Being in a hot city makes it easier for Vanderbilt to recruit higher-rated students, which raises its prestige, whic then accrues to the prestige of Nashville, and so on.

The same effect is in action with these coastal elite cities. Their economic clout and prestige attract prestigious or rising schools like Vanderbilt or Cornell to set up shop there, which makes them even more desirable, etc.

This article also shows the high levels of ambition and dynamism that characterize the growing cities of the South. I’m reminded of the former CEO of the Charlotte Chamber once saying, “To understand Charlotte, you have to understand the scale of our ambition. We don’t want to be number two to anybody.” They want to grow, to change, to rise in stature.

This spirit of boosterism and dynamism once characterized America in general, but it is largely absent from much of the country today. Restoring dynamism in America generally, and reversing those geographic inequalities, is going to require injecting a more ambitious and dynamic spirit into those left-behind places. This can be hard to kickstart because the people who’ve chosen to remain in them like things the way they are, whereas the South has many newcomers who aren’t wedded to the past there at all.

The Coming American Population Bust

But a more dynamic attitude alone is unlikely to turn around left-behind places. That’s because demographic decline in the United States will exacerbate geographic inequalities. It’s harder to attract people when there are fewer people being born, or even future people period. And as I’ll explain, it might well make places like Nashville and Vanderbilt even stronger.

Demographer Lyman Stone had a recent op-ed in the New York Times where he talked about how the population bust is coming sooner than we think (gift link).

If America’s population does decline, it will strain our entitlements system, damage the economy, reduce innovation and entrepreneurship, and cause serious labor shortages. But the majority point of view — held by major institutions like the Census Bureau, the United Nations and the Social Security trustees — is that the United States probably won’t face population decline until the 2080s, or even beyond 2100.

That forecast is far too optimistic. The more accurate projection, which I outlined in a recent report for my organization, the Institute for Family Studies, sees the American population beginning to shrink in the 2050s. It is a forecast so grim, it could upend American budgeting and, thus, American politics.

Modern industrial capitalism does not seem to function well in the absence of growth. It’s not just recessions. Places that demographically stagnate or decline typically start to become distressed, which often precipitates a downward spiral. Significant fixed costs that become more burdensome per capita or per household with decline are a part of this.

Stone is very pro-immigration I believe, but he doesn’t believe immigration can solve the problem:

There are two major pieces of wishful thinking in the flights of fancy that underpin American population forecasts. The first is immigration. The Census Bureau assumes the United States will have an annual net migration (immigrants minus emigrants) of about one million immigrants through the end of the century. The United Nations and Social Security trustees assume about 1.2 million immigrants a year throughout the 21st century. None of these forecasts are plausible. Net migration under President Trump will most likely turn out to be near zero, and he won’t be the last immigration restrictionist in our nation’s highest office. Moreover, birthrates are collapsing across the entire planet, not just here at home.

Stone also believes birth rates will continue to decline rather than stabilize, meaning population forecasts are too optimistic:

Up until quite recently, the Social Security trustees’ main scenario assumed that fertility rates will rise from now until 2050 and stabilize at 1.9 children per woman…What evidence supports these predictions? Birthrates have fallen almost continuously for nearly 20 years, an entire generation. They have fallen through good economies and bad, through Republican administrations and Democratic ones, through every tax credit and child-care subsidy.

It’s a grim forecast, and Stone argues that only interventions equal to the scale of the problem can turn things around:

Closing a gap this size will not happen through a few thousand dollars of tax credits sprinkled on young families; we have tried pocket change, and pocket change has failed. It will take serious money aimed at the people doing the work of raising the next generation of Americans, an end to the marriage penalties woven through our tax and welfare codes, a surge in building family-size houses on par with the one during the last baby boom and a culture that treats children as a future worth having rather than a lifestyle expense. Those are big asks, but they are things Americans can achieve if they set their minds to it.

Click over to read the whole thing.

What we see in places with demographic decline is that population concentrates in fewer remaining zones of dynamism and opportunity. Look at Japan, for example, where people poured into Tokyo as the countryside saw the emergence of ghost towns.

Demographic decline might thus actually benefit places like Nashville and regions like the South that are well-positioned to be the last man standing. Simply put: demographic weakness will make it very difficult to address geographic inequalities, in addition to the other challenges it will pose to the country.

The Draw of Eastern Orthodoxy

We read a lot about young people, especially young men, turning towards Eastern Orthodoxy. This short clip by Paul VanderKlay, who is a pastor in the Christian Reformed Church (Dutch Reformed) from Sacramento, sheds some light on that phenomenon, and also a mode of public engagement I want to highlight.

In brief, Orthodoxy offers both historically-rooted solidly, and also an immanent experience. I thought his comparison of Orthodoxy to Pentecostalism in terms of experience was particularly interesting.

This shows how VanderKlay is a good example of the high-minded Protestant man. He fits the bill of what I’ve called the New Trustee archetype. Notice his desire to get at the truth, not just propagandize for his own position. He has a generosity of spirit in noting what is praiseworthy in Eastern Orthodoxy, and acknowledging the downsides of his own tradition.

While certainly not limited to Protestants, there’s something about the way Protestantism, with its belief that everyone needs to read and understand scriptures themselves and the lack of belief by its denominations that they are the one true and infallible church, particularly forms people in this way. This is a spirit that we associate especially with the mainline tradition.

Best of the Web

WSJ: Forget Work. Passive Income Is the New American Dream (gift link) - One thing I’ve noticed about Gen Z is that many of them are deeply allergic to traditional 9-5 employment.

The Cut: 11 Rounds of IVF, $250,000, and No Baby - Clinics are seeing more patients over 45 trying to get pregnant. It’s not as easy as celebrities make it look

Harper’s: Republican Machines - Can the GOP save the humanities? - An interesting article about the rise of “civics centers” on college campuses. I previously interviewed Paul Carrese, who was the founding director of the center at Arizona State, the model for these departments.

WSJ: China Is Devastating the Last Stronghold of German Industry (gift link). Europe is now experiencing the same industrial disruption from Chinese competition that the United States went through.

New Content and Media Mentions

My article on the New Trustees was reprinted in the Free Press.

I got a mention from Rod Dreher and Patrick Brown.

I also wrote an article this week on the end of the populist style in American politics.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover image: Peabody Library at Vanderbilt University by Dansan4444/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.