Expanding Ivy-Plus Institutions: Why AI Infrastructure Will Be America’s Next Wealth Builder for All

James Edward Billetz
Founder at By the Grace of Code
October 12, 2025

How policymakers, elite universities, and AI hyperscalers can build the next generation of American trades academies.

For generations, the American Dream promised that with work and education, anyone—regardless of race or socio-economic background—could rise. In practice, that promise was often gated: by generational wealth, elite networks, and long-debunked theories that rationalized exclusion. Today, a technological inflection point is prying those doors open in ways not seen before in U.S. history.

Elite Education’s Hidden Gate

From the republic’s earliest days, families with means converted wealth into power through education. Ivy League and “Ivy-Plus” institutions have been central to this pathway, concentrating access to leadership across finance, government, and industry. Recent analyses show students from the richest one percent remain vastly overrepresented, with legacy admissions, donor status, and socioeconomic background shaping access to the nation’s most powerful networks [1]. The impact is not symbolic. Alumni from these institutions direct a disproportionate share of economic activity—MIT-affiliated entrepreneurs alone are linked to an estimated $1.9 trillion in annual global economic output, roughly the world’s 10th-largest economy [2]. These schools shape who leads—and what the economy values.

Exclusion’s Long Shadow

Elitism wasn’t the only gate. Pseudo-scientific rationalizations—like Richard Lynn’s claims to rank racial groups by “evolutionary intelligence”—once provided a veneer of legitimacy for exclusion in admissions and employment [3].

At the same time, policy choices embedded inequity into law. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 imposed a 100-to-1 sentencing ratio between crack and powder cocaine, disproportionately impacting poor Black communities and driving large-scale exclusion from the workforce. Even after the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 reduced the ratio to 18:1, Black Americans have continued to represent the vast majority of those incarcerated for crack offenses despite comparable usage rates [7][8].

Meanwhile, federal methamphetamine sentencing—affecting predominantly White and Native American communities—imposes similarly harsh mandatory minimums, with possession of just 5 grams of pure meth (“ice”) triggering a five-year sentence and 50 grams resulting in ten years or more [12][14]. Recent analyses from the U.S. Sentencing Commission show meth convictions often carry longer average sentences than crack, powder cocaine, or heroin, further excluding millions from economic participation and skill development [13].

These laws create injustice across racial lines: Black Americans bear the enduring impact of crack statutes, while harsh meth sentencing devastates White and Native American families. Though overtly unequal policies have diminished, their legacy persists—for millions of Americans, meritocratic mobility remains stymied by networks, norms, and laws that constrain wealth creation by limiting access to upskilling or reskilling initiatives [4][5][7][8][12][13][14].

A New American Frontier

We’ve entered a different kind of opportunity cycle. The explosive demand for skilled trades—electricians, HVAC technicians, millwrights, fiber installers, and more—to build and maintain AI hyperscaler data centers and advanced power systems represents a true inflection point. Unlike prior waves, this boom doesn’t reward four-year degrees or legacy connections; it rewards citizens who complete technical training and earn the clearances required to power critical infrastructure. Apprenticeship and credential pipelines—often in partnership with major institutions and industry—are expanding to meet the need, with elite actors now signaling support for trade education at scale [10][11].

Rebalancing Wealth, Broadening Ownership

This shift can redistribute opportunity more broadly than previous industrial revolutions. Founders and investors will continue to capture outsized returns, but the trades ecosystem around AI infrastructure—construction, grid modernization, thermal systems, secure facilities—opens high-wage paths to ownership, entrepreneurship, and intergenerational wealth for Americans across racial and socioeconomic lines. As citizenship and technical skill replace Ivy credentials as the price of admission, policy and corporate leadership can ensure that those who build America’s AI backbone share in its gains.

From Privilege to Partnership

I believe elite leaders have both an opportunity and a responsibility here. As I presented in “The Argument for Elite White Privilege,” transformational reforms in America have often accelerated when people with the greatest means and access chose to leverage their position for justice [9]. The First Step Act stands as a bipartisan example of what aligned elite engagement can unlock. Today, the reported $500 million Harvard trades initiative suggests a similar pivot: a bastion of generational privilege engaging with government and industry to expand technical education and wealth-building pathways for the broader citizenry [10]. That is not charity; it’s strategic nation-building.

At By the Grace of Code, I’m committing to this future. We are designing large-scale awareness campaigns, state-of-the-art training campuses, and a tech-rich, all-inclusive trades career platform to identify aptitude, remove cost barriers, and accelerate placement into national-security-critical roles—with zero tuition burden and comprehensive supports. We’re targeting 30 million digitally fluent young adults without four-year degrees—an overlooked, high-conversion demographic that can help power the next century of U.S. infrastructure and growth [11].

The playbook is straightforward: align profit with resilience. For C-suites and policymakers, that means funding ad campaigns and seat blocks, co-designing curricula and apprenticeships, and tying incentives to placement, retention, and wage growth. If Ivy-Plus institutions bring endowments and networks to bear, if industry commits to talent pipelines, and if we—as operators—deliver measurable outcomes, we can replace cycles of exclusion with engines of prosperity, equity, and security.

The choice is plain. We can cling to models past their prime—or we can champion, invest in, and scale the partnerships that prepare Americans to build what the AI age requires. The American Dream should not be a myth curated by a few; it should be a mandate executed by all, with all.

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Cited Sources

1. Study of Elite College Admissions Data Suggests Being Very Rich Is Overrepresented at Ivy Colleges. The New York Times, 2023.

2. MIT Entrepreneurs: The World’s 10th-Largest Economy. MIT Executive Education, 2020; New report outlines MIT’s global entrepreneurial impact. MIT News, 2015; Entrepreneurial Impact: The Role of MIT.Now Publishers.

3. Richard Lynn – Wikipedia; Scientific racism – Britannica, 2025.

4. Elite and Upper-Class Families. Sage Publishing; Access to Elite Education: Wealth, Merit, and Inequality, Burton F., 2014.

5. Ivy-Plus Schools could be perpetuating economic inequality. SSTI, 2025; How America’s Elite Colleges Breed High-Status Careers—and Misery. Mother Jones, 2025.

6. MIT Report Illustrates Impact on Global Entrepreneurship. Kauffman Foundation, 2016; The evolution of universities as engines of innovation. Stanford Report, 2025.

7. Princeton Policy Advocacy Clinic Students Release Analysis of Federal Crack-Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparities. Princeton University, 2024.

8. It’s Time to End the Racist and Unjustified Sentencing Disparity Between Crack and Powder Cocaine. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, 2021.

9. The Argument for Elite White Privilege. James Edward Billetz, 2025 (LinkedIn).

10. Trump says Harvard will run new trade schools as part of grant deal. NY Post, 2025; Trump previews $500 million deal with Harvard on trade schools. CNN, 2025; Harvard may run trade schools under Trump’s proposed $500M deal. Asian Journal, 2025.

11. By the Grace of Code LLC – AI Jobs & Wealth Creation for All Americans, What We Do.(bythegraceofcode.com, 2025).

12. Federal Drug Trafficking Sentencing Guidelines for Schedules I–V (Methamphetamine details). Boyle, Jasari & Co., 2025.

13. Methamphetamine Trafficking Offenses in the Federal Criminal Justice System. U.S. Sentencing Commission, 2024.

14. Mandatory Minimum Penalties. United States Sentencing Commission, 2025.