My apologies for the lack of posts. This weekend has been a real bitch, and I’ve generally lacked the motivation to do much of anything. I’ll try and be better this week, starting now, with this great op/ed in the LA Times about access to higher education.
And so another gap widens in a nation where the annual cost of attending some top liberal arts colleges and private universities surpasses the U.S. median household income of $44,389 a year. The annual bill for tuition, room and board and other expenses at the University of Southern California is about $44,580. Northwestern University charges $44,590. The costs at New York University and Washington University in St. Louis are a couple of sweatshirts and textbooks short of exceeding the median household income. The bill at 75 schools in the U.S. now exceeds $40,000.
Students admitted to these and similar schools are by definition high achievers. Yet some pay far less than the sticker price because they receive merit scholarships. Many of these students’ families can afford to pay, but schools give them money because the students’ high SAT scores help the schools rate higher in college guides, including the U.S. News rankings.
The more selective schools do offer financial aid to needy students, but there’s less space for them as wealthier students, who generally score higher on the Scholastic Assessment Test, take the merit scholarship bait. According to higher-education analyst Thomas G. Mortenson, the percentage of low-income students attending 32 of U.S. News’ 50 top national universities fell between 1992 and 2001. Low-income enrollment at 33 of the magazine’s top 51 liberal arts colleges dropped as well.
My experience is based soley on being an undergrad and law student at NYU, but it’s certainly the case that low-income students have a much harder time getting through four years of school. I knew a lot of students who had to leave NYU after freshman year because their families just couldn’t afford it anymore. NYU also gives some of the lowest levels of financial aid in the country — on average, it only meets 68% of its incoming students’ financial needs. Of top 50 schools, only BYU and St. Louis University (both of which have tuitions that are significantly lower than NYU) meet less student financial need.
Last week, University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann labeled merit scholarships “a big culprit” in colleges’ arms-race-like competition to outrank each other. “Colleges and universities are fighting for students who have high SAT scores. It’s a fight to the bottom, and the only people who gain are affluent families,” she said.
Gutmann said middle-class families with incomes between $50,000 to $100,000 a year suffer. They are less able to afford the enhancements that help build a student’s credentials for a merit scholarship: a house in a top-end school district, a private school, tutors and college counselors or comprehensive SAT prep courses.
Read the whole thing. The writer doesn’t even get into graduate education, which, as far as I can tell, is even more limiting, particularly for students with undergraduate loans. My parents paid for my undergraduate education, but I’m paying for law school myself. It’s daunting enough to take out almost $200,000 worth of loans for three years of graduate school — I imagine it would be completely unmanagable if I already had tens or hundreds of thousands of loans outstanding from my undergraduate education. And NYU Law is definitely not great with financial aid in the form of loans.
That isn’t to say that it’s impossible for low-income students to go to undergraduate or graduate school. But attending the country’s most elite universities — the ones from which a degree will likely land you a higher-paying job, particularly if you’re looking for work in a competitive area — remains an option for relatively few.
UPDATE after the fold:
Slate has more.
I now know that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, supposedly a time when the admissions process had at last been freed of archaic bias, “legacies” were two-and-a-half to three times likelier to be admitted than was the average applicant; that admitted legacies ranked lower than average admits on everything Harvard cared about—personal attributes, extracurricular activities, academic achievement, recommendations, and so forth; and that the degree of preference granted legacies was only slightly less than that given to black candidates, who in turn received less of a thumb on the scale than did athletes. I was, in short, an affirmative-action baby.
Well, who among us isn’t? Karabel notes that even today 40 percent of Princeton’s freshman class consists of legacies, athletes, and under-represented minorities, the three chief beneficiaries of admissions preference.
Interesting, though, isn’t it, that it’s racial minorities who are targeted as the ones “not deserving” of admissions.
Karabel’s ultimate goal in deconstructing merit is not, however, to vindicate affirmative action but to expose the hollowness of the central American myth of equal opportunity. The selection process at elite universities is widely understood as the outward symbol, and in many ways the foundation, of our society’s distribution of opportunities and rewards. It thus “legitimates the established order as one that rewards ability and hard work over the prerogatives of birth.” But the truth, Karabel argues, is very nearly the opposite: Social mobility is diminishing, privilege is increasingly reproducing itself, and the system of higher education has become the chief means whereby well-situated parents pass on the “cultural capital” indispensable to success. “Merit” is always a political tool, always “bears the imprint of the distribution of power in the larger society.” When merit was defined according to character attributes associated with the upper class, that imprint was plain for all to see, and to attack, but now that elite universities reward academic skills theoretically attainable by all, but in practice concentrated among the children of the well-to-do and the well-educated, the mark of power is, like the admissions process itself, “veiled.” And it is precisely this appearance of equal opportunity that makes current-day admissions systems so effective a legitimating device.
It is intriguing that affirmative action policies are the ones which throw people right, left and center into a tizzy, when white, WASP-y “stupid sons of rich men” have been benefiting from weighted admissions policies all along. When was the last time you saw a heated debate on athletic-preference admissions, or saw a College Republicans group have a “legacy-admissions bake sale”? Affirmative action is far from perfect, as I said above. If life were truly a meritocracy and if we were playing on an even field, it certainly wouldn’t be necessary. I hope that we can get to a point where every child in this country has access to a good education, and is financially able to go onto higher education. But that’s not the case. Affirmative action challenges elite power structures enough to really upset people — it affords an advantage, however slight, to a group of people who are systematically disenfranchised. It challenges the deeply ingrained sense of entitlement that so many white Americans from upper-class college-educated families hold. A few weeks ago I got into an argument about this issue with a very good friend who went to an elite New England boarding school; he flat-out said, “If your parents went to the school and have given back, then you deserve to go.” How admission to an elite university is “deserved” by virtue of your parents’ wealth, or even their contributions, is still a mystery to me.
So let’s face it: We don’t live in a meritocracy. College admissions policies play with the word “merit” until it becomes virtually meaningless. Is that a good argument for affirmative action? Not particularly. There are better ones out there. But I think it does point out the hypocrisy in focusing so heavily on affirmative action as a great injustice, while ignoring the various policies and admissions structures which so heavily benefit whites and the economic upper classes.