A common theme in discussions of the American higher-education system is the increasing intensity of the struggle for admission to elite colleges. The Chronicle has given plenty of attention to this theme, noting the bias in favor of the wealthy created by early admissions, looking at schemes to game the system and at how such gaming might be turned to social advantage, and reporting on how to survive the ordeal.
The struggle is often presented as the product of wrongheaded policies, pushy parents, and so on. In reality, however, the problem is both a consequence of, and a contributor to, the growing inequality and polarization of American society.
The most striking feature of this polarization is the rise of an elite containing about 1 percent of the population, which has received most of the benefits of economic growth over the past several decades, and now accounts for roughly 25 percent of total income.
On the other side of the equation is about 80 percent of the population, which is experiencing stagnant living standards and increasing economic insecurity.
Between those two groups sits the top 20 percent or so of households, doing well but outside the real elite. People in this group work mainly in professional and managerial occupations. This category of households has experienced income growth broadly in line with that of national income, neither racing ahead like the elite nor standing still like the vast majority.
While the top 20 percent of households has done well, individual households in that group have nothing like the security and stability that characterized the professional and managerial classes of past generations. On the upside, most recruitment to the wealthy elite is drawn from the top 20 percent. On the downside, the risk of slipping into the mass below is ever present.
College education is a crucial mediating step here. Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, who direct the Brookings Institution’s Center on Children and Families, show that children from families in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution are nearly five times as likely to remain there than children from families in the top 20 percent are to end up in that bottom quintile. College shifts the odds sharply. Haskins and Sawhill find that children whose parents are in the bottom 20 percent of earners triple their own odds of earning $85,000 or more per year by obtaining a four-year degree. Yet, as the two researchers observe, “Kids from poor families are ... less likely to enroll in and graduate from college as compared with kids from families with more income.”
The supply side of the equation is even more striking. The total number of places in elite private universities in the United States has remained largely unchanged since the 1950s. Harvard alone receives enough applications every year (almost 35,000) to fill the entering classes in all of the Ivy League as well as Stanford and MIT, with thousands of applicants left over. Taken together, the Ivy League and other elite institutions educate something less than 1 percent of the U.S. college-age population (27,000 entrants per year, compared with an 18-year-old cohort of more than three million). That’s just about enough to fill all the slots in the top percentile of income distribution.
Of course, not all the top spots in that distribution go to Ivy League graduates; in fact, a majority are drawn from the much larger group of graduates of state flagship universities. But the narrowing of opportunities is true for the flagships as well. Those institutions expanded rapidly in the early postwar decades. There was a further expansion in the 1970s as women’s enrollment approached (and later eventually surpassed) that of men. Since then, however, enrollments at the state flagships have remained largely static, while the population has grown.
In sharp contrast to earlier periods, there have been few new universities, or even new campuses. The University of California at Merced, opened in 2005, proclaimed itself the first new American research university of the 21st century, and the first in California in 40 years. That’s worth proclaiming for Merced, but it’s an indictment of the higher-education system as a whole.
With declining state support, many of the state flagship institutions are becoming private in all but name. In particular, they are seeking freedom to set tuition fees along the same lines as the elite private schools. The implied tradeoff is higher fees and better quality for a smaller number of students.
Virtually all the expansion in postsecondary education has been concentrated in the lower-tier systems of community colleges and the less-prestigious state universities. As of 2009, 40 percent of all students (26 percent of full-time and 66 percent of part-time) in postsecondary degree-granting institutions were in two-year colleges. On the plausible (though not necessarily accurate) assumption that the average time spent in four-year universities is twice as long as in two-year colleges, and adjusting for the disproportionate number of part-time students, that would imply that around two-thirds of those who go to college at all do so at two-year colleges.
Unfortunately, these lower-tier institutions are failing badly, and in ways that make this comparison more difficult. On the one hand, they have higher dropout rates (which would imply that the total number attending is even larger than that two-thirds). On the other hand, time to completion of a two-year degree is nearly always more than two years. The picture is further complicated by the prevalence of part-time enrollment. In their 2010 report, “Divided We Fail,” Colleen Moore and Nancy Shulock found that six years after initial enrollment, only about a third of community-college students in California had completed their degree, about half had dropped out, and around 15 percent were still enrolled. National studies paint a similar picture.
The situation at the second-tier state universities is somewhere between that of the flagships and the community colleges. Some are excellent, but others are not. A recent report found 25 state universities with four-year graduation rates of 4 percent or less.
Even for those who manage to graduate, degrees from lower-tier institutions do not, in general, provide a route into the upper end of the income distribution. The wage premium for an associate degree over a high-school education is only about 20 percent. Moreover, while the wage return for a bachelor’s degree has grown sharply over time (with the growth being greatest in the Ivy League), that for an associate degree has remained static. Community college pays off only for the minority of students who are able and tenacious enough to manage the transfer to a bachelor’s-degree program, and then to complete that degree.
With those numbers in mind, the ferocity of the admissions race for the elite institutions is unsurprising. Even with steadily increasing tuition fees, parents and students correctly judge that admission to one of the “right” colleges is a make-or-break life event, far more so than a generation ago. The odds in the competition are getting longer all the time, as a growing pool of aspirants goes after a fixed number of places.
As the dominant oligarchy becomes smaller and smaller, and open competition for entry to the elite work force is replaced by informal procedures like internships, personal connections will become steadily more important.
Under those conditions, if higher education were a for-profit enterprise (I hope to talk in a later column about the reasons for the general failure of for-profit education, except as a vehicle for exploiting public subsidies), elite universities would be generating huge monopoly profits. The nonprofit status of the elite universities means that the proceeds of ever-increasing tuition fees aren’t paid out to shareholders but are spent on luxurious facilities, corporate-style management excess, and high salaries for “star” faculty members.
Some attempts have been made from within to turn this around. Amherst College, for example, has managed to increase the proportion of its students receiving Pell Grants, from 13 percent in 2005 to 22 percent recently. But the picture over all is getting steadily worse. A recent report from the Education Trust, arising originally from a consumer-oriented survey aimed at finding good college choices for low-income students, found, in essence, that there were none. According to the study, “Priced Out,” only five public universities in the country (none of them state flagships) met three modest criteria:
- an annual cost for low-income students of $4,600 or less, after financial support is taken into account;
- a graduation rate of more than 50 percent;
- at least 30 percent of total enrollment being Pell Grant recipients or from other lower-income families.
The combined result of the trends I’ve outlined is that the idea of the United States as a land of opportunity is thoroughly obsolete. Even for the adult population, intergenerational mobility between income groups has been substantially lower than in the European social democracies. But with education both increasingly critical to life chances and increasingly stratified along class lines, the higher-education system now contributes to the development of a self-sustaining oligarchy.
Efforts are being made at many institutions to address the problem of class stratification through changes in admissions policies. But in the absence of broader structural change, those efforts will be overwhelmed by the economic and social forces pushing in the opposite direction.
Within the university system, attempts to more fairly allocate a fixed number of places are doomed. What is needed is a substantial expansion of affordable, high-quality education. That could be achieved by expanding existing elite and flagship colleges, creating new ones, or upgrading the standards of lower-tier institutions. The last of those approaches is, in many ways, the most appealing, but it is also the one that would most directly require a need for a major increase in public funds, reversing the trend of recent decades.
Unfortunately, even radical reforms of the higher-education system will be unavailing if the broader society continues to become more unequal. In any society where 1 percent of the population reaps 25 percent of national income, the children of that 1 percent will be guaranteed an easy ride into the best colleges, the top jobs, and the ruling class of the next generation.
