Newsflash: Higher education is less about opportunity and more about upholding traditionally privileged classes.
Americans are committed to the belief that everyone, no matter how humble his origins, has a chance to rise to the top. Our leading colleges and universities play a pivotal role in this national narrative, for they are considered major pathways to power and privilege.
Today, the competition to get into these institutions is at an all-time high, and this has led to serious problems across the socioeconomic spectrum — gnawing and pervasive anxiety among the affluent, underrepresentation among the middle classes and an almost total lack of access among the poor. Changing the situation will take drastic action. Despite their image as meritocratic beacons of opportunity, the selective colleges serve less as vehicles of upward mobility than as transmitters of privilege from generation to generation.
This has certainly been my observation. As an undergrad at NYU, I was shocked at how many kids came from exclusive private schools — a system I hadn’t even known really existed, at least not to the extent that it does. I was shocked to read the yearbook of a close friend of mine who graduated from Exeter, and see that his friends had all written how sorry they were that he got stuck at NYU, that he deserved so much better. I was shocked to learn that just by virtue of going to an elite private boarding school, you basically had a ticket into a very good university. I went to a good public high school in a community where property costs are high and schools are well-funded, and there were always a handful of kids who went off to Stanford and Princeton and smaller liberal arts schools like Amherst and Pomona. But it was a handful, and it wasn’t the rule. On the list of schools that students were attending, NYU was one of the best. I had never really considered that my good grades wouldn’t count as much as the good grades of a kid coming from another school. I had never considered that getting into anything less than a top-ten school was a failure in some places. I had never considered that there were probably a whole lot of kids who had good grades at public schools a whole lot worse than mine who weren’t even considered for admission.
I was at an advantage in applying to schools because (a) my public school was pretty good, and (b) my parents had the resources to pay for things like private tutoring and SAT classes. It was fairly obvious when I got to college that most people there had those resources, and then some — SAT prep classes were part of their required high school curriculum, for example. So it’s no surprise (and certainly not news) that the best schools have the most privileged students:
Just how skewed the system is toward the already advantaged is illustrated by the findings of a recent study of 146 selective colleges and universities, which concluded that students from the top quartile of the socioeconomic hierarchy (based on parental income, education and occupation) are 25 times more likely to attend a “top tier” college than students from the bottom quartile.
This is one reason why anti-affirmative action arguments really tick me off. The traditionally powerful classes have such a huge edge on college admissions that whining about a person from a less powerful group getting in strikes me as not only petty, but incredibly entitled. College admissions have never been about merit and merit alone — they’ve been tools to maintain power and class structures, and they’re incredibly inequitable. If we want to talk about “fair,” we should talk about the fact that admissions are incredibly skewed toward the most privileged people — we shouldn’t be complaining that some black kid took “my” spot at Harvard.
Yet at least since the 1970s, selective colleges have repeatedly claimed — most recently in amicus briefs submitted to the Supreme Court in the landmark affirmative case concerning the University of Michigan — to give an edge in admissions to disadvantaged students, regardless of race. So it came as a rude shock a few years ago when William Bowen, the former president of Princeton, and his associates discovered, in a rigorous study of 19 selective colleges, that applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds, whether defined by family income or parental education, “get essentially no break in the admissions process.”
The paucity of students from poor and working-class backgrounds at the nation’s selective colleges should be a national scandal. Yet the problem resides not so much in discrimination in the admissions process (though affirmative action for the privileged persists in preferences for the children of alumni and big donors) as in the definition of merit used by the elite colleges. For by the conventional definition, which relies heavily on scores on the SAT, the privileged are the meritorious; of all students nationwide who score more than 1300 on the SAT, two-thirds come from the top socioeconomic quartile and just 3 percent from the bottom quartile.
I’m sure that rich kids are just smarter. Right?
And then there’s the issue of paying for college, which the author of this article doesn’t address. The best schools are pretty pricey; even public schools aren’t cheap. The expectation, though, is that parents pay for university. Mine certainly did. Even a student loan often requires a co-signing parent. And the incredible costs of education aren’t limited to tuition — there’s books, sorority or fraternity fees, sports fees, car payments, dormitory prices, and then basics like food. Parents are assumed to pay for all of that, too.
Then there’s grad school, which is increasingly required to work in a high-paying field. The only reason I can afford to go to grad school is because my parents paid for college, and because I got into a law school that practically guarantees me a job upon graduation. I’ll be a few hundred thousand dollars in debt, but that’s manageable given the career prospects coming out of a place like NYU; it wouldn’t be manageable if I had undergraduate loans as well. It definitely wouldn’t be manageable if employment prospects were iffy.
Point being, let’s not delude ourselves into believing that education is a meritocracy. The solutions that the author of this piece offers are good, but it has to start earlier with equality of education in the beginning stages. But that means an overhaul of our entire current system, and I’m afraid I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Until then, affirmative action for traditionally disempowered groups is a decent, if inadequate, start.