How Elite Colleges Drive Income Inequality

In the last few months, there's been a flurry of articles in the mainstream press acknowledging the same problem: a paucity of high-achieving, low-income students at elite colleges. "Better Colleges Failing to Lure Talented Poor," says the New York Times. ABC tells us "Colleges Struggle to Connect With High-Achieving Poor Students." Likewise, NPR is concerned that "Elite Colleges Struggle To Recruit Smart, Low-Income Kids."

Why does it matter that top-performing low-income students aren't making it into the best schools? After all, many other above-average schools would be happy to accept them and even give them adequate grant or scholarship money. And its likely that a worthy degree from a competitive institution would give these students at least a decent shot at moving up the income ladder. Harvard grad Ross Douthat has an answer that Ivy-leaguers knew long ago: "...elite universities are about connecting more than learning... the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates." The absence of low-income students in elite higher education underscores its failure to facilitate social advancement.

Higher education in general hasn't done a good job of serving low-income people. As Richard Vedder has noticed: "In 1970, 12 percent of recent college graduates came from the bottom quartile of the income distribution; 40 years later, the percentage was 7.3 percent." Jeffrey Selingo, a writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education, has pointed out in his terrific new book College Unbound that just 8% of the lowest income group gets a B.A. vs. 82% from the highest income group.

The picture is similar at America's top colleges. The 200 most selective colleges take only 15% of applicants from in bottom half of income distribution. 7 in 10 students at those colleges come from top income groups. And the Harvard Crimson, summarizing an important NBER paper by Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery, reported that "only 34 percent of high-achieving high school seniors from the bottom quartile of the income distribution went on to attend one of the country's highly-ranked selective schools."

Of course, lower-income students have fewer resources for accessing top colleges: less money for application and test fees, fewer role models, fewer guidance counselors. These persistent inequalities cannot be mitigated by elite colleges alone. But assuming that the elite colleges feel some obligation to enroll low-income students, their own recruiting efforts are currently subpar. A recent op-ed in the New York Times captured well the pessimism of students from rural, poor backgrounds with high aspirations. The writer, who grew up impoverished in Nevada but is now an English professor, noticed that more selective schools didn't appear in conversations about college:

Of course, the U.S. military can recruit on a much larger scale than elite collegess due to their greater personnel demands and budgetary allowances. But their success should still inspire our elite schools. To that end, perhaps our top schools should create regional cooperatives that establish contacts with and assist top students in the admissions process.

Even if schools did a better job of recruiting these students, it is increasingly not in their financial interest to do so. The current financial model of private colleges is to keep tuition prices high so as to capture a great amount of money from students who can afford to pay top dollar. This money then funds fanciful construction projects and superfluous creature comforts for students, which, as this essay in the Atlantic pointed out, do wonders to attract more of the same students.

Furthermore, when they do accept low-income students, many fairly prestigious colleges are comfortable loading up students with loans and shortchanging them on grants. A remarkable new report from the New America Foundation exposes some well-regarded schools' practice of enrolling a low percentage of low-income students and sticking them with a high tuition bill. In fact, "nearly two-thirds of private nonprofit institutions charge students from the lowest income families a net price of more than $15,000." At Boston University, for instance, only 15% of students accept Pell Grants (given to financially needy students), but the net price for those students is still around $24,000 per year. Similar statistics reflect the reality at Carnegie Mellon and American University. At Santa Clara University, 15% of the students take Pell Grants, but still are expected to contribute $46, 347 per year.

In fairness, many of the elite schools, most notably Harvard and Princeton, have a de facto policy of not letting any student whose family makes less than $30,000 per year pay anything. MIT, Stanford, and Rice are among the best schools on the New America Foundation's chart, with Amherst being the very best (Pell Grant students there have an annual expected contribution of only $448 per year). I have written that an education at the most elite institutions is worth a high amount of debt, but at many schools, like the ones above, that becomes much less of a value proposition. The author of the report noted that colleges could enroll and support low-income students if they wanted to, but that the "relentless pursuit of prestige" deters them. Truly elite schools (with massive endowments and operating budgets) can offer more money than second-tier private schools that are grasping for elite status. They will always have a high demand of people willing to pay their tuition rates. Conversely, second-tier private schools have to compete harder for an ever-shrinking pool of the most moneyed clients. They will never capture the revenues that the Ivies do, and will eventually become forced to offer less money to their needier students. Alas, this is another unfortunate consequence of private schools trying to emulate the economic model of their elite counterparts.

Lastly, there is a fundamental disagreement between collegiate leadership and students on the reason for college. Only 39% of college presidents in a recent survey said that the price of a university or college degree was a "very important" consideration. 65% said it was a "very important" consideration whether the percentage of students from their university are able to get a good job. And these are college presidents. Conversely, a survey of 192,000 freshmen revealed that students had many motives for going to college, but the answer that got the highest percentage of affirmative answers (88%) was "to get a better job." In an age when most students care about credentialization over learning, the presidents are tone deaf. The proliferation of novelty and unrenumerative academic programs, combined with the polyannish sales pitches of admissions and financial departments, has produced at least two generations of college students who think they can major in anything, take on debt, and still be secure in their economic future.

Ironically, the abandonment of poor students by so many prestigious schools directly contradicts their core leitmotif: social justice. For all their rhetoric about "fairness," and "empowerment," the private university's business model usually depends on enrolling an abundance of rich students and burdening the poor ones. Higher-ed watchers often scold the university from abrogating its role of in loco parentis, especially on sexual matters. Letting the poor absorb crushing financial weight is just as pernicious.

David Wilezol is the co-author, with William J. Bennett, of the new book Is College Worth It?

I'm sure there are some — but probably not nearly as many as the libs would like to believe.

I took a poor black child under my wing when he was 4 years old, and let him play with my little white private-school kid of the same age. We lived in a predominantly white working-class city neighborhood. The boy was obviously smart, verbal, nice-looking and capable. He asked probing questions and wanted to be taken to see public buildings, such as churches and museums, and I was happy to take him. He lived in the "alley street" with his grandmother, and saw his mother only intermittently, because she had a large number of children with all different fathers. When he was 6, he and his sister came to me ashen-faced and wanting to be hugged. I sat them on the front steps and put my arms around them and asked what was wrong. He said his mother's boyfriend had killed the baby in its crib, then blamed it on them, and those two children had spent a school night being questioned by police.

The babykiller was caught and convicted, and I continued to help that boy and include him in group playground activities, take him places, buy him school supplies and give him life lessons in values. I went to bat for him with a nasty white teacher. He continued to show great promise; and would proudly show me good schoolwork; but his homelife was a wreck. Eventually his mother got her own place; and from time to time I would drive him home after he had come back to stay with his grandmother. The apartment was filthy, with all kids sleeping on one nasty mattress without sheets (to be fair, I had also seen this condition with a married couple of white psychiatrists whose kids were in my kids school).

From his age of 12 to 14, predictably, we started to have difficulties. I sat him down and explained how stable people have to work for what they have; that me and my siblings started working at age 12 and never stopped; that he would have to prove himself in this world, keep his nose clean and avoid bad kids and bad behavior; I also explained racism to him. I encouraged him to find worthy male mentors, sports, school or church activities to help him stay on track. But he began stealing from me. Little things would disappear from the house. A dollar and change from grocery shopping left in the kitchen, or five bucks in a birthday card, would disappear. If I left him in the car while I ran into the 7-11, my parking quarters would be gone from the ashtray. Then one day I caught him digging into my purse (which I had stashed deep in the closet) in an obviously well-practiced way; I guess he had been doing this to his mother and grandmother for years.

I sat him down and told him this was unacceptable and any more of it would result in serious consequences, about which I was specific. I went to his mother and told her he was stealing. She said, "What you think I can do about it? I can't do nothin."

I said, "You are his MOTHER. You may be the only one who can teach him right from wrong. Stay with it. Don't let him fail now. Her response: "Put him out yo house. That's what I do."

So, after several false starts, including teaching him how to do small jobs, write me a bill and get paid, and attempts to discipline him at least not to steal from his friends (since the small cash he would get would not make the sacrifice worthwhile), I reluctantly had to cut things off, and told him we could still do things together, but he was no longer to come inside the house because it was the consequences of stealing from us. But he stopped coming around altogether. I remember seeing him once on the street when he was 15, and we exchanged a truly heartbroken look and polite greeting. That was all.

Eventually we moved away from the area. Years later, when he would have been around 30, I looked him up on the Internet. The first thing that came up was his arrest record. He had become a small-time gangsta rapper, had garnered bad publicity all over the city, and had been convicted of a crime I do not wish to divulge here and had spent time in jail. I cried for days.

My point? By the time they get to college, it may be too late. Harvard and all such liberal institutions would be better served by returning to their original roots in the church and spending their money on orphanages for urban kids run by Ten Commandments values when they are small and JROTC values when they are past puberty, with horrible parents given only limited visitation, if that. But of course, that would all be against the Liberal Law. We are too far gone.

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