The Great Sorting

College education is becoming a passive participant in the reproduction of economic privilege. Taken one at time, postsecondary institutions are fountains of opportunity; taken together, they are a highly stratified bastion of privilege.

Of course, sorting by race, class, and sex begins long before college-admissions officers get involved. And almost a third of Americans don’t even go to college, while 36 million in the work force have gone to college but not earned degrees. But sorting continues in terms of what kind of college you attend, whether you graduate, how much farther you go, and (an important factor often overlooked) what you major in—all decisions that make a difference to later earnings, and that reflect highly segregated social and economic patterns.

The patterns are reinforced as an unintended consequence of the business model of higher education: Competition among institutions is based on prestige, relentlessly matching the most-advantaged students with the most-selective institutions, while the rest are stratified in a finely grained hierarchy of separate and unequal tiers of four-year and two-year institutions.

Therefore, as enrollments in higher education increase, individual students are better off, in that more of them have access to some form of education. But inequality among students as a whole spreads.

Institutional competition simultaneously increases postsecondary quality and inequality. Happily, the number of selective and highly selective colleges in Barron’s Guide to the Most Competitive Colleges has grown by more than 30 percent since the 1990s. Unhappily, the share of students from the bottom income quartile at the 200 selective colleges has stalled at less than 5 percent. And white flight has long since moved on from the leafy green suburbs to the nation’s selective college campuses, leaving the overcrowded and underfinanced community colleges to blacks, Hispanics, and lower-income students.Postsecondary stratification matters. The most-selective institutions spend more per student, have better graduation rates, and offer better access to jobs or graduate and professional schools than less-selective institutions do. Where you go and what you take determines what you make. And more than dollars and cents, the current dynamic of selectivity separates learning that transforms lives from job training.

On the surface, the great sorting seems impartial. After all, we each have to do our own homework to make the grades and ace the tests that give us access to the most-selective colleges and the best jobs.

Fair enough? Not entirely. In a society where people start out unequal, the test-based metrics that govern college admissions become a dodge—a way of laundering the money that comes with being born into the right bank account or the right race or ethnicity.

Maybe the more affluent kids are just born smarter? Not so. For most low-income kids, there is no relationship between their innate abilities measured in childhood and their aptitudes developed in time for college. Conversely, the best predictor of the developed aptitudes of adolescents from affluent families is their innate abilities when they were children.

Unintended or not, postsecondary stratification presents a nagging moral hazard: a barrier to upward mobility that is inimical to our American democratic ethos and our claim to worthiness in the global contest of cultures.