America sees itself as a meritocracy. No other nation has turned upward mobility into a civic religion. And education has been central to that ethos, allowing us to reconcile our individualism with our egalitarian commitments. Rather than an elite drawn from a hereditary caste, social mobility ensures a “natural aristocracy” based on talent. Horace Mann has a famous line about education as “the great equalizer ... the balance-wheel of the social machinery.” Educational institutions, especially colleges, act as the upward escalators.
Or at least that’s the idea. In practice, American higher education has become a powerful means for perpetuating class divisions across generations. Despite decades of reform, billions of dollars spent on Pell Grants, and genuine efforts by many colleges to widen their doors, the proportion of students from poor backgrounds at four-year and selective institutions has not risen since the early 2000s. The relationship between family income and college attendance by the age of 22 is very strong, as recent research from Raj Chetty and his colleagues at the Equality of Opportunity Project shows. Six out of 10 25-year-olds raised in families in the top fifth of the income distribution (incomes of more than $120,000 a year in today’s money) have a bachelor’s degree, compared with a third of those in the middle 40 percent, and just one in 10 from the bottom 40 percent.
America likes to see itself as a meritocracy, and college as an engine of social mobility. In reality, writes Richard V. Reeves, “higher education has become a powerful means for perpetuating class divisions.” How did that happen, and what can colleges do about it?
This class gap in college attendance and degree completion widens when it comes to selective institutions, and further still for the most elite institutions. At Middlebury College, where protesters hit the headlines for disrupting the speech of the conservative scholar Charles Murray, as many students (23 percent) come from the top 1 percent of households as come from the bottom 80 percent of households (24 percent). Middlebury is not an outlier. Top-ranked colleges and universities are dominated by affluent students. Across all elite universities, 15 percent of students come from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution, while just 4 percent come from families in the bottom fifth.
Although many Americans pride themselves on living in a classless society, there is a growing class separation, especially between the upper middle class and the majority. The divide can be seen in income trends, wealth gaps, neighborhood quality, health, life expectancy, and so on. But the most potent symbol of upper-middle-class separation is the elite university.
On America’s college campuses, inequality is illuminated, and then reinforced.
“The current postsecondary system is becoming more and more polarized,” write Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, who are both at the Center on Education and the Workforce, at Georgetown. “The choices offered are the lavish, full-service degrees offered by the pricey brand-name colleges that come with a graduation, graduate school, and good-jobs warranty, or the bargain-basement alternatives offered on the cheap with no guarantees of completion or long-term value in the labor market.”
So, what is to be done? It hardly needs saying that this is a complex, chronic problem. There are no easy fixes. But there are three areas where institutions, individually and collectively, should focus their attention: simplifying applications; investing most in those with the least; and widening admissions criteria.
First, simplify the application process. My son, who is a high-school senior, is considering colleges in both the United States and Britain, as are many of his friends. All the Americans are stunned by the simplicity of the British application process. My son and I are horrified by the byzantine complexity of the U.S. one. Pity the person who thinks that the Common Application is common, or that the Universal College Application is universal.
Throw in early admissions, a stated preference for those who have “shown strong interest” in a college (usually by visiting a campus), widely varying scholarship offers, and opaque cost structures, and pretty soon it becomes a full-time occupation just to apply.
How does all this reinforce inequality? Let’s take early decision, just one thread of the admissions web. Some top colleges now fill half their slots with applicants admitted early. Students getting an early decision are favored to the tune of around 100 extra points out of 1600 on the SAT entrance exam, according to one study. The problem is that early decisions are much more common for affluent students, because first, they know about them, and second, because those students who are applying for financial aid typically have to wait for the main admissions round. (Related to this: The application process for federal student aid could be radically simplified, as Susan Dynarski and Mark Wiederspan have argued.)
Complexity is the friend of the upper middle class. And applying to college in the United States is an extraordinarily labor-intensive and complicated affair, even for those who know the system. For those with limited knowledge, it is a navigational nightmare. All of which means that applicants from well-resourced households, with educated, motivated parents, are likely to do better in the admissions game than those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Since members of the upper middle class dominate the higher-education system, both as producers and consumers, perhaps it is no surprise that complexity reigns. But it is terrible for social mobility.
The second step sounds simple: Invest institutional resources to attract those with the least. Many colleges do, of course, offer generous scholarships to students from poorer backgrounds. The problem can be finding and attracting suitable candidates in the first place (of which more in a moment). But the top colleges also spend a lot of money attracting affluent students, most obviously through lavish accommodations and facilities. They also try to draw such students in more direct ways, such as through merit aid, which offers financial inducements to applicants with strong academic credentials but who may not even need such assistance.
This is a trend that has been analyzed by Stephen Burd at New America. His conclusion is that in a free market, merit aid has become a discount used to attract the “right kind” of student — the kind with parents who can pay full tuition. In the 1990s, as Burd tells it, some institutions realized that they could steal good, wealthy applicants away from others by offering them modest amounts of financial aid (about $2,000-$5,000 a year). At first, this worked. The colleges would throw out some breadcrumbs and attract wealthy students who basically paid full price. The problem is that this practice inevitably became an arms race. There are now many websites helping to find the colleges with the juiciest merit-aid packages. The more colleges spend on merit-aid packages, which typically go to more-affluent students, the fewer resources are available to support those with greater financial needs.
Although Americans pride themselves on living in a classless society, there is growing class separation. The most potent symbol of that separation is the elite university.
Many of the well-intentioned people running institutions of higher education, including many flagship public universities, are trapped by these market forces. Their desire to be more socially inclusive can run counter to their financial responsibilities. Rebecca Blank, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, acknowledges the problem. “It worries me a great deal, the type of merit aid I see being offered to top students from Wisconsin. … That’s a real waste of where we should be spending our money,” she says. “But I’ve got to keep some of those top students in Wisconsin. We’ve got to play in that game ... It is one of these arms-race things that I’m not happy with but I don’t quite know what to do about.”
As Caroline Hoxby of Stanford, a leading economist in this field, points out, the United States is unique in having “arguably the only true market for higher education ... Market forces still dominate this market ... and that really sets us apart.” The competition for students in this market is good news in the sense that it drives up productivity and — Hoxby would argue — economic growth. But it’s bad news in the fight against inequality, because the best “customers” for colleges are often those who are already at an advantage.
Related to all this is the issue of legacy preferences. Rooted in anti-Semitism, the practice of giving an advantage to the offspring of alumni is now simply embarrassing. Nearly three in 10 of Harvard’s incoming freshmen have family members or relatives who attended the university, according to The Harvard Crimson. At the University of Virginia, admissions are influenced not only by legacy status but, as a matter of policy, by the scale of alumni donations. (The same is no doubt true elsewhere; UVa just got caught by The Washington Post.)
Perhaps the leaders of the selective liberal-arts colleges and research universities — most of which include a legacy preference in their admissions process — are afraid they will lose revenue from alumni donations if they do away with legacy admissions. Given the wealth of some of these institutions, this financial argument is pretty risible. As it happens, the evidence for the connection between donations and legacy preferences is actually quite weak.
I do suspect that many college leaders are privately uncomfortable with a practice that explicitly gives a hand up to applicants from wealthy, well-educated families. But, as with merit aid, there may be disincentives to acting alone. So here’s an idea: How about doing it together, at the same time?
The third, and most challenging, action for top colleges interested in fighting inequality is to select for social mobility. This means redoubling efforts to find talented potential applicants, including in neglected rural areas; investing in mentoring schemes like the successful Accelerated Study in Associate Programs at the City University of New York, which provides personalized tutoring and counseling; and lowering or removing financial barriers.
But given the deep class stratification in American higher education, more radical steps are required. In particular, the criteria for admissions should include a much wider definition of “merit” than at present. This doesn’t mean lowering standards; it means taking into account economic and educational backgrounds when assessing potential. In Britain, universities consider “contextual data” when making admissions decisions. The intuition here is that a B student from a poor family attending a low-performing high school is as good as an A student from an affluent household at a top-ranking private boarding school. The University of Bristol has announced that students attending high schools in the bottom 40 percent in terms of academic outcomes will receive admission offers for credentials “two grades lower.”
If U.S. colleges prefer to look closer to home, perhaps they could take inspiration from Chicago’s selective high schools, which allocate a certain number of places to students from low-income parts of the city. This means that the required score for admission on the entrance examination is lower for an applicant from a poor South Side neighborhood than for one applying from upscale Hyde Park.
Colleges determined to widen their doors could also base their admissions criteria on the ZIP codes (the long version) of the applicants, assuming they attend a public high school, as proposed by the Harvard scholar Danielle Allen. Applicants from the poorest neighborhoods would get into top colleges with considerably lower SAT and GPA scores than those from the most affluent. Or how about a lottery for those above a certain academic threshold? That would be fairer than the current quagmire.
Some might see all this as tilting the playing field in favor of the poor. I would say it is merely leveling it. America’s top colleges are among the best in the world. They play a vital role in educating and cultivating the leaders of tomorrow — the “natural aristocracy” upon which the American system relies. Right now, however, they act as cogs in an efficient class-reproduction machine, a central institution of a society The Economist has aptly labeled a “hereditary meritocracy.”
We are riven by divisions of ideology, class, and opportunity. The need for action from our best colleges and universities has never been greater. Will they — will you — step up?
Richard V. Reeves is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Dream Hoarders (Brookings Institution Press, 2017).
