Same As They Ever Were
Yes, I'm complaining about highly selective colleges again
I have, occasionally, been accused of having bias against highly selective colleges1 and well… there is probably some truth to that accusation.
I mean this Substack is called “College Sanity” and not “How to Get Your Kid Into an Ivy, Please Pay Me $5000 for Consulting” for a reason.
That isn’t because I doubt the quality of the education. I think it would be amazing to take a class from someone like Henry Louis Gates or Jamaica Kincaid, who’ve both taught at Harvard, for example. I also don’t question that attending a highly selective college can confer some economic and social privileges and can make it easier to get into some graduate or professional programs. I can understand why some students want so badly to go to these schools. Getting in must feel like a shiny stamp of approval (all that hard work paying off) and what feels like the closest thing you can get a 17 to a promise that you will be okay… you’ll have a fancy degree and which will lead to a the right grad school or the good job and increased odds for an economically stable adulthood.
I’m not here to shame anyone who has attended a highly selective school or who wants that option for their kids … I get it, the cachet of those big names schools is real and enticing.
(I’ll pause here to note that I also am sure that there are some students who are passionate about the thing they want to study and want to do it with the people they perceive as the best in their field. They also might think it would be cool to study with Henry Louis Gates)
I’m not even mad at the highly selective schools for how expensive they are (though they could almost all be cheaper if they wanted to be) because many of them do offer competitive financial aid for lower income students.
The problem is that they’ve never actually been all that great at admitting those lower income students.
Recently, a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at enrollment trends for the 65 most selective private and public colleges and universities and revealed a startling finding: While these schools have become more racially and geographically diverse there has been “no increase in the economic diversity of elite private and public colleges” in the last 100 years.
This is, frankly, wild to consider.
If we use 1923 as our starting point, it means that our nation’s most selective colleges have not had a sustained increase their economic diversity2 even after the Great Depression, after the implementation of the GI Bill, after the introduction of FAFSA and Pell Grants, during the Civil Rights era, following the widespread adoption of standardized tests that were supposed to help level the playing field and find “diamonds in the rough”, under affirmative action admissions policies, or even during the COVID pandemic and the resulting shift to test optional admissions.
While a few of the highly selective public universities (particularly in the University of California system) and a few women’s colleges did slightly better, the truth is that children of the wealthy and ultra-wealthy are still wildly overrepresented in highly selective institutions and have been for more than 100 YEARS.
(Does it count as economic diversity when they admit both the children of the 1% AND children of the 5%? No?)
The study notes “Students with parents from the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution have consistently made up approximately 5 percent of the student bodies at these institutions throughout the last century”.
In contrast, by 2016, 39% of all college students came from at or near the poverty line which is a striking improvement from the 8% that came from the bottom 20% back in the early 1900s.
A note here: this is still not nearly good enough. Despite popular narratives about the declining value of a college degree and politically motivated attacks on colleges and universities trying to provide more access to historically excluded or underrepresented students, nearly all the data on higher education outcomes is SUPER clear: individuals that have a college degree will make more money over the course of their lifetime and have other markers associated with a higher quality of life (including more civic engagement, better physical and mental health outcomes, and a decreased likelihood of incarceration).
Simply put: access to higher education has been and continues to be a driver of social mobility and one of the best ways to combat poverty.
This is also why, if you asked me which schools have the power to change the world, I will sing the praises of community and technical colleges for an annoyingly long time and would likely make you regret this fictional scenario where you asked me that question.
I would never say “Harvard”.
Part of this is my on-going frustration with how these highly selective schools, dominate the narratives around college admissions, resulting in many families, especially first generation students, overestimating how difficult it will be to get into college. I’m also salty about the way that some of them (*cough* University of Chicago *cough*) are playing the “recruit to deny” game and actively sending admissions materials to students who are highly unlikely to get accepted, just to drive down their acceptance rates3.
But mostly, I’m frustrated that they have helped4 create an academic arms race where kids whose brains aren’t even fully developed are afraid to get an A-, are suffering through AP classes that they hate5, and are afraid to slow down for a second in fear of not getting admitted when the truth is that they can do EVERYTHING right and still not get in because there just aren’t that many spots open for kids who didn’t have the good fortune to be born wealthy.
When some schools, including Dartmouth, Yale, Penn, and Brown and non-ivies like Tufts and Washington and Lee, admit more students from the top 1% income bracket than from the bottom 60% we have to stop pretending that highly selective admissions is an academic meritocracy.
And now, with this new report, we have to acknowledge again that it never has been, especially for poor students.
For the purposes of this essay, let’s define those as the schools that regularly admit less than 10-15% of their applicants
Let’s call a spade a spade here: when we talk about economic diversity, we’re talking about students from the bottom income quartile
Um, “allegedly”. Also, standard disclaimer: These are my views and not the views of any current, former, or future employers
Parents and some schools bear some blame here too
I think a lot about the family I met whose daughter wants to be dancer or graphic designer and was spending HOURS a week in tutoring for AP chemistry because her parents were worried a B in the class or just taking a regular chemistry class would nuke her college chances.