A recent study from Opportunity Insights, a research organization based at Harvard University, recommended eliminating admissions criteria at elite colleges that give an advantage to applicants coming from families in the top 1 percent. Doing so, it argued, would diversify who goes on to become part of the 1 percent.
Calls like this, to expand the number of openings for the non-ultra-rich at elite colleges, have sounded for years. As the Opportunity Insights study showed, the individual benefits are undeniable. Graduates of Ivy-Plus colleges (which for the study includes Ivy League colleges as well as Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago) are 60 percent more likely to reach the top 1 percent in earnings than graduates of the best public colleges with comparable SAT/ACT scores. They’re also twice as likely to attend highly ranked graduate schools and three times as likely to join prestigious firms.
One problem, as the study points out, is that eliminating legacy, athletic, and character preferences would yield an average of only 144 more students annually at each Ivy-Plus college from families outside of the top 5 percent in income. While it’s debatable just how financially diverse these beneficiaries would be, providing any number with a ticket out of poverty for them and their progeny is an unquestionably laudable goal. But there’s a difference between mobility for a few and mobility for the group to which they belong.
A common argument in response, which the authors of the study also make, is that getting a more diverse group into the upper echelons will have a positive effect on society because they will then be influential decision makers and national leaders. But those who most successfully leverage the networks, knowledge, and institutional imprimatur of an Ivy-Plus degree to make it to the top, as defined by wealth and prestige, are best described as a “power elite.” We can’t assume that people motivated by earnings or status, even if they come from middle-class backgrounds, will place society over themselves. Studies of the power elite indicate that diverse backgrounds don’t necessarily lead to different decision making.
There is little reason to think that giving hundreds of seats to students from an only slightly more financially diverse group would make a notable difference in the declining rate of upward mobility we’ve seen over the last half century. Even more ambitious ideas to greatly expand — even double — the number of openings at elite colleges would be unlikely to move the needle in any meaningful way. Instead, elite colleges must reimagine how they operate so that their focus is more on improving the greater good and less on improving the personal good of those who are lucky enough to attend.
Admissions to elite colleges have become more equitable while society has become less so. As Thomas Piketty illustrates in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 30 years of shared economic growth post-World War II was all but erased by the succeeding 30 years, with the top 10 percent of earners capturing 75 percent of the country’s income growth.
There’s a difference between mobility for a few and mobility for the group to which they belong.
We shouldn’t be surprised. After all, that’s what elite colleges are designed to do: concentrate extraordinary resources — status, connections, and knowledge — for a select few. What graduates should do with those resources is rarely discussed by college leaders beyond rhetorical allusions to making a positive impact. That evasion is understandable: However polarizing the debate is over who gets into elite colleges and why, it’s a far easier question to resolve than what it might take for an educated elite to serve the public interest when it may run counter to their own. The question we should be asking Ivy-Plus colleges is not only who they will admit and why, but how they will educate a power-sharing elite.
Many elite colleges point to their volunteer programs and community-engaged research as examples of how they inculcate a public-service ethic and make a positive societal impact. Such activities undoubtedly can have a meaningful effect on participating students and those they’re designed to serve. This I can attest to, having led a service-learning organization called the Petey Greene Program, founded at Princeton University to recruit undergraduates as volunteer tutors for incarcerated students. By the time I became executive director in 2019, the organization had expanded to eight states and the District of Columbia, recruiting 1,000 volunteers annually from 30 colleges, tutoring 2,500 students a year in 50 prisons. Volunteers often reported that the experience was the most meaningful of their college careers. For incarcerated students, tutoring provided individualized academic support and positive interactions, both of which they were generally deprived of while in prison.
But alleviating the symptoms of inequality and oppression through volunteerism — helping 2,500 incarcerated people a year — is not the same as working to dismantle a system that locks up two million people, eviscerating mobility in communities that are predominantly low income and non-white. Yes, many volunteers inspired by their experiences have become lifelong advocates for criminal-justice reform, but to really be effective, volunteerism needs to happen as part of a broader effort to create systemic change.
That meant, in our case, a shift from supplementing weak prison-education programs with volunteers, to advocating for and creating better programs and extending tutoring to incarcerated students after they are released. This shift required changing how the organization recruits, supports, and educates volunteers: Among related reforms, we started a lecture series featuring prominent activists to educate volunteers on the broader movement for change, and we helped develop a program with Howard University students to recruit and support Black volunteers. In the end, the program’s adoption of a systems-change model, informed by the insights of those directly affected, should not only enable the program to make a greater difference in the lives of incarcerated students, but also help the educated elite understand that reform is a community effort — there will be no individual saviors among them.
There are many reforms elite institutions could make to expand mobility beyond changes to admissions policy — from revising how endowments are invested and who makes those decisions, to curriculum and tenure criteria. But from the standpoint of educating a power-sharing elite that understands what systemic change requires, nothing may be more vital than enhancing community-engaged volunteerism — be it service-learning programs, community-engaged research, or other community-based action — because that kind of volunteerism’s reason for being is to redress conditions that constrain mobility for others. Institutions should place community-engaged learning in efforts to create broader systemic change.
That is rarely done now because it is hairy, complex work. It invites accountability for long-term outcomes, not just short-term inputs. When I asked the service director of a top prep school how they evaluate the impact of their myriad volunteer programs, he responded with something like this: That would require that we establish goals. And if we have goals, we would have to evaluate whether we achieve them. And if we evaluate whether we achieve them, we might not. He then shared that Geoffrey Canada, founder of Harlem Children’s Zone — which sets block-by-block goals and strategies to increase social mobility, evaluating outcomes against them — once told him that funders require those working with low-income people to evaluate outcomes six ways from Sunday, an anecdote presumably offered to render my question rhetorical by implying, why would we choose to do that?
But imagine if elite colleges did make that choice. Imagine if Princeton, for instance, took all its volunteerism and community-engaged research and set them in service to concrete, quantifiable, structural changes to increase mobility in its own community of Mercer County, New Jersey, which includes the neighboring City of Trenton.
Institutions should place community-engaged learning in efforts to create broader systemic change.
Trenton has more neighborhoods with concentrated extreme poverty than any community in the state, and neighborhoods where at least 40 percent of people live below the poverty line, with an 18.8-percent unemployment rate. What if Princeton worked with a neighborhood in Trenton — engaging residents, businesses, nonprofits, and government institutions — to identify the most-pressing issues that limit mobility for neighborhood residents, and then supported strategies to achieve specific goals with specific timelines? Maybe those goals would include raising high-school-graduation rates, reducing evictions, or increasing employment rates. Such goals would be tangible and linked to actionable strategies as part of a realistic long-term plan to increase social mobility. For students, this collective effort with measurable benchmarks, and the university playing a supportive role, would demonstrate what the actual work of social change looks like year by year, decade by decade.
Some elite colleges might point to their alumni in public service as evidence they’re already making a positive public impact — as Christopher L. Eisgruber, Princeton’s president, did in a 2021 interview in The Atlantic, titled “Should Princeton Exist?” Asked to justify elite education and the allocation of resources to a few students during a time of deepening inequality and intensified demands for racial justice, he responded that the university’s outsized investment in a few students was justified by the outsized contribution of its graduates. You have to “bet on excellence,” he explained, those who will “deliver a return on investment.” He offered Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor as an example.
It is undeniable that Ivy-Plus alumni have made extraordinary contributions to the world. But for every Sotomayor, there’s an Ivy-Plus alum in public service with a countervailing impact, be it on the Supreme Court, in the Senate, or in the Oval Office, to whom Ivy-Plus institutions don’t as readily lay claim. Elite institutions must rethink how they educate students capable of leading collective action, rather than relying on the odds that a bet on greatness will pay off.
