Jordan Weissman at the Atlantic provides some numbers about the representation of rich kids at elite schools. He writes, “at the most selective schools in the country, 70 percent of students come from the wealthiest quarter of U.S. families. Just 14 percent come from the poorest half.”
At the other end of college spectrum, community colleges attract poorer kids, who aren’t tranferring to 4-year colleges. A report summarized in the Chronicle finds that community colleges, which educate 44 percent of all college kids, over represent minority and needy students and aren’t doing enough to raise standards and provide a stepping stone to more challenging schools.
Should college be worried about income inequality?
Apt. 11d 
Yes. College is supposed to be one way to close the income gap. If they’re perpetuating that gap, then that’s a real problem.
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Do you think that a ‘fair’ process in life would result in as many kids from the bottom quintile as from the top quintile reaching the top quintile as adults? Should reaching the top quintile as an adult be a result of diligence combined with a high level of ability?
It’s worth unpacking the going-in assumptions. Do you think that high levels of ability/diligence are found with the same frequency among the poor as the rich? Ought parents not be able to purchase advantage for their kids? Should it be limited? (You can hire a tutor and send the kid to enrichment camps, but buying a library for Good Old Alma Mater should not get your idiot kid in the door, e.g.). Duke Ellington said at Armstrong’s funeral: “Louis was born poor, died rich, and hurt no one along the way” – we surely did a poor job of capturing competence and sending it to college in the beginning years of the past century! Folks writing about the importance of early childhood education have been lugubriating for years about how the kids are on a track to failure in life by kindergarten, you have to do Head Start and better still send visiting nurses out to pester 6-month-old children by waving books at them to repair what their parents are doing. If you believe that stuff, what can colleges reasonably be expected to do?
We’ve been making a concerted effort at the college level to capture talent from lowest quintile – and most specifically AfAm talent, and to a lesser extent latino – for the last forty years. There’s been some success – Clarence Thomas and Deval Patrick came from humble backgrounds, Franklin Raines was the son of a janitor, and there are many others. On the other hand, a lot of that effort has in fact just made life a little easier and sweeter for folks who were on a success track to begin with: Jesse Jackson’s kids have done nicely, Chris Edley of Boalt Hall is the son of a Harvard Law grad, Obama was raised by his upper middle class grandparents and went to Punahou.
As an undergrad, I went to an open-admissions junior college and Directional State College, and then to Flagship State University. The FSU kids were more competent. They had more cultural background, and they were smarter, more intellectually aggressive, more confident in their judgements than the kids with whom I went to JC and Directional. The kids with whom I went to grad school at Harvard were somewhat ahead of the FSU kids, though the difference was not huge. There’s a sorting process, of which swell colleges are a part. You go to a big-deal school, and it helps. People at least don’t throw your resume away without reading.
The rumor is that $5 million could get your academically-qualified-but-didn’t-hit-the-admissions-lottery kid into Harvard, and it would take $10 million to get your kid in if s/he really was not qualified. My closest friend who went to the College as an undergrad said, ‘we knew who belonged there, and who didn’t’ – which suggested to me that Dad was not necessarily doing Roscoe a favor with the $10 million check. I’ve actually been a TA at Harvard (Ec 10) and there was a very wide range of competence in the papers I graded, so I’m not a believer that their admissions process looks only at academics. The general level was high, though.
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Most people think Development Cases make up a greater percentage than they actually do. The best book on exactly how much money it takes to buy a kid into Harvard et. al. is Daniel Golden’s “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges – and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.” Reads like a tawdry novel. (Spoiler: @dave.s’s rumors are correct: the price is a donation in the millions.) Worth noting that colleges always give preferences to the children (but not the grandchildren) of undergrad (but not the college’s graduate or professional school) alums, and the director of admissions always has the final word.
At Dartmouth, it is apparently harder to peddle influence. Duke has said they take 100 to 125 students a year based on their family wealth or connections — as little as $20k can help for SLACs, while the amount is closer to $250k and up for top 15 schools with big classes like Penn and Cornell.
Is it worth it to accept development cases? I’d argue yes. They make up such a miniscule number that yes, they do help the institution. It’s not a huge deal to accept one weak student if the other 4,200 can enjoy a better library. The better questions might be: is it worth it to accept recruited athletes and (in the non-Ivies) to give them a full ride when the team sucks and nobody goes to their games? Is it worth it to have alumni preferences at all? Where’s the real value add?
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Actually, colleges seem to be moving in the opposite direction, choosing to sacrifice accessibility for the things that matter to the faculty, i.e., reputation, facilities, etc. Some cases in point: Wesleyan elected to end need-blind admissions, rather than cut back in other areas; Cooper Union elected to start imposing tuition, etc.
My understanding of the numbers is the same as dave s.’s: seven figures at HYP, sixes at the lesser Ivies. There’s a bit of a sliding scale, depending on how unqualified the kid is. Incidentally, this doesn’t really offend me, as the numbers involved are tiny.
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What I absolutely want out of colleges is competent ophthalmic surgeons and pediatric psychiatrists and engineers to keep the water system running and soil scientists. Politicians who have some sense of what went wrong for Vincent Impelliteri and what went right for Rudy Giuliani when they were mayor, and what insight that can provide for current administrations. Competent teachers. New antibiotics. Once that stuff is satisfied, then I am interested in thinking about social mobility of the students.
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Is that list exhaustive?
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Yeah, I think competence (or the ability to be so) is pretty much equally distributed at the lower quintile and the upper quintile (not the least because both of those quintiles are huge, containing a huge number of people). Even if there was a statistically significant difference between the two (oh, say, at the p=0.001) level, one would except a great number of equally competent people at both levels. So a system that reinforces the privileges of the top quintile is loosing lots of ability at the lower quintile.
And, even more so for genius and excellence (are likely to be equally distributed, because I think they are rare enough that they are unlikely to be concentrated in the top quintile, and thus, I always worry about the loss of genius for lack of opportunity.
Finally, I think democracy is inherently incompatible for a caste based system in which there is not frequently mobility among groups of people. I do not believe that the population at large will vote to maintain the status and privilege of the top quintile over years and years in which the the caste of people at the top remain the same. Thus, disregarding morality (say in the case where one believes that people are primarily rewarded for their talent and diligence and rise to their level of competence, as a parallel to the system where one is rewarded for one’s accumulated karma with one’s status), a static class structure will result in revolution or repression.
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Could we be more precise about who’s “rich” and who’s “poor”? The Upper quintile in the US begins at about $100,000 per household. (http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_11_1YR_DP03&prodType=table)
The upper 4.3% begins at $200,000 per household.
Households making $200,000 are not pledging millions of dollars to elite colleges. If they live in New York City or Silicon Valley, with more than one child, taxes and a mortgage, they may not be able to pay full college tuition.
The upper quintile comprises about 24 million households. People able to fund college buildings are very rare. If I had to bet, I’d say the population of married college professors were more likely to have children enrolled at elite colleges than the population of billionaires. The average upper quintile household is more likely to be two married professionals these days than Jay Gatsby or the Buchanans.
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If they live in New York City or Silicon Valley, with more than one child, taxes and a mortgage, they may not be able to pay full college tuition.
There’s really no way at all to make anybody in the bottom three quintiles care about that. Or in the top two quintiles but lives somewhere else.
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Yeah. I don’t care about that, either. If I have money to spare, it’s going to go to trying to find the mozart in the barrio not to support the family that is trying to send their kid to Harvard but only makes 250K a year.
On the other hand, I consider solid public universities with affordable tuition to be a part of the infrastructure, like roads, libraries, K-12 public schools, public transportation, water, sewer, and electricity, and public safety. When OSU, Berkeley, U MIch, and the rest become unaffordable to most, I am worried.
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Yes to your understanding of who those 200K folks are. The NY times had a cool graphic that showed the profession (and their proportion) at different income levels. An interesting quirk was that school teachers were fairly highly represented in the 20th%, presumably because they are more likely to be married to professionals.
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Ohio State is now $10k for instate tuition alone. That’s better than my current institution and probably still workable for most, but the trend isn’t good.
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In my earlier comment, I put in a line: “Folks writing about the importance of early childhood education have been lugubriating for years about how the kids are on a track to failure in life by kindergarten, you have to do Head Start and better still send visiting nurses out to pester 6-month-old children by waving books at them to repair what their parents are doing. If you believe that stuff, what can colleges reasonably be expected to do?”
I wish the commenters here would roll around with that a bit. Possibilities:
1. You can’t really make kids over by the time they are out of high school, they are either on track to be high function or not, society effort should be concentrated on early childhood and looking to colleges to improve social mobility is misguided
2. A big deal in colleges is you get to signal that you are someone who the Brown (Dartmouth, Stanford) admission committee thought was swell, and if you get that signal spread around more, kids who otherwise would have gone to Chico State may get a chance to shine.
3. The teachers and facilities at Stanford are so swell that a kid who is randomly parachuted in there from Champaign-Urbana suddenly develops better knowledge and skills and is really better than he otherwise would have been.
As a bonus, here is an article by James Taranto, who was an editor at the student paper at a fourth-tier state school on how he made it to the big leagues: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324216004578479410300334682.html.
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I’m less worried about that than I am that Chico State will be unaffordable.
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Re Taranto: I can’t quite get how that article says directly how he “made it to the big leagues,” but I can speculate about what happened. He published something that was relatively conservative, and he caught the attention of the conservative movement and was turned into a kind of poster boy for oppressed college students who just have to be able to publish racist stuff. (Note: I am not claiming the cartoon was racist, though it might have been problematic in context. That said, I cannot imagine the faculty advisor of my college paper ever intervening in something like that.) But the late 80s were the years that was happening. Look at Dinesh D’Souza and Ann Coulter. (Btw, during my recent move, I found a box of old college stuff that included a copy of the Cornell Review with Ann Coulter on the masthead as EiC.)
I see some college students “made over,” though not as many as I’d like. I had a student in his freshman year who was a disaster, but by his senior year he’d really pulled things together. He’d dealt with personal tragedy during the intervening years–his parents both passed away. But the experience made him grow up a little–and he said he realized what an immature jerk about college he had been in his freshman year.
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Also, great post by Erik Loomis at LGM here: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/05/the-core-reason-for-the-humanities-crisis
Compare with this:
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My dad is a classic case of a kid who worked his way up in college. He was always a mediocre student in elementary school and high school. Lots of C’s. But he was considered a success, because his two older brothers didn’t even finish high school. His older sister went to a teacher college, which was a lot like nursing school back in the days. He came from a poor household in the Southside of Chicago. His dad died one month before he was born. His mom got a job at Marshall Fields as a undergarmet specialist. She squeezed fat ladies into gurdles. Four kids, two grandparents (grandfather was an alcoholic), and a working mom in one old home. As the youngest kid in a chaotic family, nobody paid attention to my dad.
My dad went to the University of Illinois at Navy Pier, a college for kids with bad grades. He pulled himself together and had some excellent professors. He was able to transfer after two years to the University of Chicago, and later got a PhD at Fordham on a scholarship.
My mom also came from a working-class, disfunctional family with an abusive, alcoholic father who actively opposed any educational advancement in his daughters. After going to secretarial school, mom worked two jobs to put herself through Hunter College.
Higher education can be a game-changer for the poor and working class. It was in my family. We just have make sure that the highly motivated, smart working class kids, like my parents, continue to get those opportunities.
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Except for not being poor, at least for the Depression, my dad was similar. I don’t know if he’d have gotten the chance to finish these days. He finished his last degree at the top of his class. but did very bad at the start.
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