Columnist like Maureen Dowd of the New York Times have made great sport of painting president-elect George W. Bush and his family as gang of elitist aristocrats. With their WASP-y New England bloodlines, the family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, and legacy memberships in Yale's Skull & Bones, the Bushes do make easy targets.

Indeed, the contrast between the aristocratic Bush pere et fils and the meritocrat whose tenure they sandwich couldn't be greater. Arkansas-born Bill Clinton charmed, worked and willed his way into Georgetown, a Rhodes Scholarship, Yale Law School, and, ultimately, the presidency. Throughout his life, Clinton surrounded himself with similarly ambitious Ivy League-educated meritocrats. Chief among them was his wife, a Midwesterner who graduated from Wellesley and Yale Law.

So it is more than a little ironic that president-elect George W. Bush has put together a team that is, in many ways, far more meritocratic than that assembled by President Clinton.

Don't get me wrong. The first Clinton administration was a meritocracy -- but largely for those who aced their SATs, or who took Con Law with Bill or Hillary in New Haven, or who bunked with George Stephanopoulos at Balliol College, Oxford.

Consider: A Harvard man was Vice President. Defense Secretary Les Aspin graduated from Yale, Oxford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Labor Secretary Robert Reich (Dartmouth College, Oxford, and Yale Law School) never tired of reminding us that he met the future president on the boat to England. Clinton chose a Stanford Law graduate and onetime Supreme Court clerk, Warren Christopher, as Secretary of State, and Janet Reno (Cornell University and Harvard law) as Attorney General. Even the token Westerners had done time in Cambridge. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt was a Harvard Law graduate, and Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros attended the Kennedy School.

Top non-cabinet advisers had similar pedigrees: Anthony Lake (Harvard, Cambridge, and Princeton), presided over the National Security Council; Robert Rubin (Harvard, London School of Economics, Yale Law) chaired the National Economic Council.

To a degree, the Clintonites were a throwback to an earlier aristocratic era, in which graduates of Ivy League and peer institutions -- which educate only a tiny minority of America's population and workforce -- naturally assumed posts at the helm of American government and industry. And in the 1990s, as in the early 1960s, those who had the misfortune to attend, say, a public university in the Midwest were largely consigned to Beltway oblivion. During the transition in early 1993, the Clintonites fed resumes into scanners and programmed computers to search them for key words. It's a safe bet Harvard's Adam House was on the list, and Fresno State University wasn't.

George W. Bush's emerging team provides a stark contrast. Virtually all his nominees are products of public universities. And there isn't a single graduate of Harvard College in the bunch.

Bush's inner campaign circle was composed largely of Texans, chief among them strategist Karl Rove, who (horrors!) lacks a college degree, communications director Karen Hughes, a graduate of Southern Methodist University, and Vice President Dick Cheney, who graduated from the University of Wyoming.

Once the election was certified, Bush tapped Colin Powell, a graduate of the City College of New York, as Secretary of State. When Powell attended CCNY, it was the ultimate meritocratic institution. CCNY's admission policy took no account of race, family connections, or the ability to pay. Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, was educated at the University of Denver. (Like Rice, Interior Secretary Gale Norton has two degrees from the University of Denver.)

Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill graduated from Fresno State and Indiana University. He's just one of four Bush appointees to have attended a Big Ten institution: Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson graduated (twice) from the University of Wisconsin, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham attended Michigan State University, and Education Secretary Rod Paige has a masters and Ph.D. from Indiana. (None of Clinton's early appointees attended a Big Ten school.)

The University of California system produced Agriculture Secretary Anne Veneman Commerce Secretary Don Evans is a two-time University of Texas man, and HUD Secretary Mel Martinez has undergraduate and law degrees from Florida State University. Early Labor Secretary pick Linda Chavez is a University of Colorado graduate.

The only Ivy League undergraduates in the bunch are Attorney General-designate John Ashcroft (Yale) and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a Princetonian.

Of course the Ivies produce more College Democrats than Young Americans for Freedom. But the origins of the respective Cabinet appointees shows that Bush, himself a graduate of both Yale and Harvard, may have a different sense of what makes people qualified to serve at the highest level of government than his predecessor.

Unlike Clinton, Bush has drawn heavily on corporate America. That's a sector in which undergraduate educational credentials tend to matter less than on-the-job experience and post-graduate MBAs. At Alcoa, and Tom Brown, and Halliburton -- companies which have all sent their top executives into the Bush cabinet -- the most crucial numbers aren't long-ago LSAT scores but profits from the most recent quarter.

Bush, whose daughter is the fourth Bush generation to attend Yale, is also refreshingly free of the snobbery and bias that many self-satisfied Ivy Leaguers exhibit.

I'm a self-satisfied graduate of two Ivy League institutions (B.A., Cornell, A.M. Harvard, thank you very much), and have noticed that when most of my cohort meet somebody, one of the first questions they ask is: where did you go to school?

There are also a host of putatively meritocratic havens that are in fact Ivy-dominated, closed clubs. Washington Monthly editors, Supreme Court clerkships, staff writing jobs on The Simpsons , associate posts at McKinsey & Co. and Goldman, Sachs -- all these highly coveted career springboards are largely off-limits to people who didn't go to the right schools.

Of course, anyone who has spent time on Ivy League campuses, as George W. Bush has, knows that their alumni don't have a monopoly on merit -- or competence. Indeed, the past eight years provide ample evidence that an Ivy League and Oxford education no more prepares one for governing than the Columbia Journalism School prepares one to be a great magazine editor. The very mention of the name Ira Magaziner (Brown University, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford) calls to mind a catastrophic policy failure. And the campaign staffs of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman (Yale and Yale Law school) were filled with enough Crimsons and Elis to square off in a crew race.

Given his fractured syntax, anti-intellectualism, and privileged upbringing and adulthood, it is tough to interpret George W. Bush's ascension to the highest elective office as a tribute to the enduring strength of the American meritocracy. But Bush's willingness to fish for talent in non-traditional pools should provide high school seniors in Carthage, Tennessee, and Hope, Arkansas, with the belief that they, too, can aspire to serve in the White House and the cabinet -- even if they don't get into Harvard or Yale this spring.