Posted on 04/22/2004 8:45:42 AM PDT by Archangelsk
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — At prestigious universities around the country, from flagship state colleges to the Ivy League, more and more students from upper-income families are edging out those from the middle class, according to university data.
The change is fast becoming one of the biggest issues in higher education.
More members of this year's freshman class at the University of Michigan have parents making at least $200,000 a year than have parents making less than the national median of about $53,000, according to a survey of Michigan students. At the most selective private universities across the country, more fathers of freshmen are doctors than are hourly workers, teachers, clergy members, farmers or members of the military — combined.
Experts say the change in the student population is a result of both steep tuition increases and the phenomenal efforts many wealthy parents put into preparing their children to apply to the best schools. It is easy to see here, where BMW 3-series sedans are everywhere and students pay up to $800 a month to live off campus, enough to rent an entire house in parts of Michigan.
Some colleges are starting to take action. Officials long accustomed to discussing racial diversity are instead taking steps to improve economic diversity. They say they are worried that their universities are reproducing social advantage instead of serving as an engine of mobility.
"It's very much an issue of fundamental fairness," Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, said in an interview. "An important purpose of institutions like Harvard is to give everybody a shot at the American dream."
The University of Maryland recently said it would no longer ask students from families making less than $21,000 a year to take out loans, and would instead give them scholarships to cover tuition. Officials at Harvard, the University of North Carolina and the University of Virginia all recently announced similar, even more generous policies.
Stanford and Yale have altered early-admission programs, partly out of a concern that they give an unfair advantage to students who do not need to compare financial-aid offers before they can commit to a college.
Over all, at the 42 most selective state universities, including the flagship campuses in California, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan and New York, 40 percent of this year's freshmen come from families making more than $100,000, up from about 32 percent in 1999, according to the Higher Education Research Institute. Nationwide, fewer than 20 percent of families make that much money.
The recent increase has continued a two-decade trend that extends well beyond the best-known colleges.
In 2000, about 55 percent of freshmen at the nation's 250 most selective colleges, public and private, were from the highest-earning fourth of households, compared with 46 percent in 1985, according to the institute, which is based at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The number from the bottom fourth dipped slightly over that period, while those from the middle 50 percent fell sharply. In many cases, the less wealthy students went to less selective schools, including lower-ranked campuses of state universities.
"There has been over the last several decades a whole slew of efforts to level the playing field for college admissions," said Alexander W. Astin, a professor of higher education at U.C.L.A. "In spite of all these efforts, access for poor kids and kids of less well-educated parents has not improved. And for kids in the middle, it's actually declined."
"This isn't good news, and it's somewhat surprising," he added.
If anything, some college officials said, the statistics may understate the level of student wealth because they rely on a survey of freshmen. When officials at Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York, matched survey data with financial-aid forms, they found that students often listed their parents' income as lower than it really was, said Cheryl Brown, the director of undergraduate admissions.
At Harvard, for instance, financial-aid forms suggest that the median family income is about $150,000.
The increasing wealth on the nation's most prestigious campuses has gone largely unnoticed until recently, though, obscured by two other trends, education scholars say.
Over the last 40 years, colleges have become more diverse in other ways, admitting far more Asian-American, black, Jewish and Latino students than they once did. Many colleges also draw from a broader geographic base, with Michigan taking more out-of-state applicants, for example, Ivy League universities relying less on students from the Northeast and almost all colleges recruiting more foreign students.
Colleges have meanwhile increased tuition rapidly, causing the number of students on financial aid to jump and creating an impression that they are from a wider economic spectrum than in the past. In reality, financial aid simply stretches far higher up the income ladder than before.
At Michigan, admissions officers created a new section of the university's application where high school students can say how much money their parents make and whether any of their grandparents went to college. Michigan started devising the questions last year when the Supreme Court was considering its affirmative action policies. The court ultimately upheld affirmative action but required the university to eliminate a point system that gave extra points to minorities.
With the new questions, Theodore L. Spencer, director of undergraduate admissions, said Michigan wanted to give proper credit to students who had compiled good academic records without the advantages that others had. "We certainly want to look at ways to create a better distribution of students," he said.
Michigan is still not dominated by wealth as some private colleges are. Almost half of its students are from families earning less than $100,000 a year, the student survey shows. But the changes are still unmistakable, say professors and others here.
"When most people think of a typical college student, they're thinking about eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and having massive debts," said Scott E. Mendy, a junior from Tigard, Ore., who receives financial aid. At Michigan, he said, "people live very well."
Summer jobs? Many undergraduates do not think twice about accepting an internship that barely covers their expenses. Many can afford to take spring break trips to Mexican resorts or Europe. Extracurricular activities often seem to be run by students who can devote dozens of hours to them each week without trying to hold down a campus job, said Angela Galardi, a senior who recently completed a term as president of the student government.
The forces behind the rising wealth on many campuses seem to be both economic and psychological, university officials say. As the income of college graduates has risen much faster than that of less educated workers, getting into the right college has become an obsession in many upper-income high schools.
With the help of summer programs, preparation classes for college entrance examinations and sometimes their own private admissions counselors, students in these schools assemble more impressive applications than they once did. They also apply to more top colleges.
The advantages of campuses with increasingly wealthy student bodies are obvious, educators say: the colleges have more resources for research and student activities, more professors doing cutting-edge work and more students who received solid high school educations.
But they also have much steeper tuition bills than in the past, and this seems to have turned off many middle- and low-income families. Some students are not willing to take on the tens of thousands of dollars of debt that is often necessary. Others, studies show, underestimate the available amount of financial aid.
"We were founded on the principle of allowing larger numbers of students to go to college in an affordable way," Mr. Spencer, Michigan's admission director, said. "But having said that, the price of college has gone up, and many of the truly needy will not bother to apply."
That concerns people here and on other campuses because of what it could mean for the variety of campus life and for the broader economy.
"We're very worried," said William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's director of undergraduate admissions. "There are some very, very talented kids in the bottom quartile who aren't even going to college. It's a huge waste of talent."
This article dovetails nicely to this op-ed from this morning: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1122337/posts
Let the "rich" pi$$ away their money financing the prestigious bastions of ivory-tower communism.
Those who have to work to earn their tuition often get more bang-for-the-buck at smaller, less costly institutions of higher education.
Don't fool yourself, the cost of higher education is phenomenally expensive regardless of where one goes.
Murray and Herrnstein predicted, in their controversial-but-brilliant work The Bell Curve, that as the marketplace grew more efficient at rewarding (with high salaries) his-intellect people (and especially as high-intelligence men and women married each other), then high-intellect and high-salary would become synonymous, and the income/intelligence continuum would become an increasingly "efficient" stratification.
And, since intelligence is largely inheritable (as they also set out to prove, hence the controversial response to their work, including outright rejection by the liberal establishment), we are now seeing the effect in the children of intelligent-and-wealthy parents, namely, that the smartest kids are from the wealthiest families.
Murray and Herrnstein pointed out that this would cause unintended negative social effects, but at least the authors were smart enough to predict the problems -- whereas the politically correct college administrators seem dumbfounded that their social engineering policies seem to have failed.
It IS?
They're not dumbfounded.
They know exactly what they are doing.
They just lie about it all the time.
not surprising at all....
this is where my anger at discrimination and racial quotas arises.....
because these quotas never affect the rich kids.....it only affects the kids of the true middle class....the bread and butter and heart and soul of America...
I guess we can just go eat cake....
Yes and a couple years down stream, it matters not a twit what college you went to, if you are good at learning what your job is about. (I don't quibble that grades and schools are important for determining the initial salary.)
Pray tell, which prestigious University did the two current contestants for the Presidency attend?????? As well, as the Previous two Occupants of the Oval Office? (Clinton, Law Degree, Bush Sr. Economics)
Now if you Dont want to be President.....
Correct. The private colleges are continuing to increase their tuition at rates 3 times the rate of inflation. Why?
Because they turn around and say to applicants, "80%-90% of our students receive financial aid".
Translation: any parent who actually saved to fund their children's education is forced, just like the IRS tax code, to subsidize everyone else who didn't bother. SO the college education system acts as a powerful "double taxation" system, and therefore the numbers as regarding tuition are not "true" in the sense that the colleges expect only the 'rich' to actually pay those numbers.
And this article is admitting, though not openly, that middle class students -- who aren't expected to pay the full amount -- are nonetheless being scared off by the published rates.
Well, the colleges are reaping the consequences of what they have sowed, IMHO.
...
The emergence of a cognitive elite
Commentators from across the political spectrum have documented the profound social changes that all industrialized societies are undergoing at the end of the 20th century--erosion of the middle class, loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs, and an emerging information age in which individual success will depend on brains not brawn. The Bell Curve tells a similar story regarding the United States. It differs from other works by focusing on intelligence, rather than education or social class as a causal variable. The authors tell us that true educational opportunity as a function of ability (measured by IQ tests) did not arrive in the United States until about 1950. Until that date only about 55 percent of high school graduates in the top IQ quartile went directly to college. From 1950 to 1960, this number jumped to 72 percent, and in 1980 over 80 percent of graduates in the highest ability quartile went to college. In addition, sorting by cognitive ability continues as students move through college. It also occurs across colleges, with the elite schools selecting the more intellectually talented students. Finally, it continues across careers in the world of work. The authors argue that intellectual stratification through occupations is driven by powerful economic pressures. This argument is based on a number of different and compelling lines of evidence. If Herrnstein and Murray are correct, current social inequalities reflect, in large part, the achievement of a meritocracy based on cognitive ability.
The notion of a meritocracy is not, in itself, an affront to American sensibilities. Social scientists have carefully documented that social mobility does occur from one generation to the next and that cognitive ability is a major factor in determining whether an individual will achieve greater or lesser social status than did his or her parents (Waller, 1971). When each generation resorts in this way, the elements of fairness and opportunity are preserved. If, however, as The Bell Curve asserts, the heritability of IQ is quite high and there is a strong tendency for those similar in ability to marry, there will be less regression toward the mean in the cognitive ability of children of the intellectually talented and, therefore, less intergenerational reassortment. Under these circumstances a meritocracy begins to look like an aristocracy, a perception that is strongly reinforced when the intellectual elite segregate themselves from the rest of society by living in separate neighborhoods, sending their children to private schools, and supporting social institutions that cater to their own unique interests.
The authors do argue that general cognitive ability (i.e., "g") is a major determiner of social status and that variance in general mental ability is largely attributable to genetic factors--propositions that are certainly endorsed by many experts in the field. The book explicitly disclaims, however, that general mental ability is the only determinant of social status, or that g is the sum total of an individual's social worth.
The role of social class of origin
The Bell Curve carefully documents in table after table, graph after graph that cognitive ability has become a more important determinant of social status than social class of origin. Although this may come as a surprise to many, it is consistent with a large body of evidence. Research methodology in the domain of individual differences has changed dramatically in the past 20 years. Many investigators in this domain now accept two major methodological principles: that single studies based on small samples are inherently uninformative and that correlations calculated from data gathered within biological families are seriously confounded. Understanding both of these principles is important when evaluating evidence often brought to bear against The Bell Curve.
Results from a single modest study carry little more weight than does a single anecdote, no matter how compelling the finding. Most social scientists, but certainly not all, have adopted the methodology of meta-analysis, a statistical tool that systematically combines the results from many studies to provide a single reliable conclusion. In a similar fashion, behavioral geneticists combine the results from numerous kinships weighted by their sample sizes to provide the best estimate of the degree of environmental and genetic influence on any particular trait. Any single study is viewed as providing only weak evidence on its own.
The confound generated by data drawn from within biological families provides numerous pitfalls when assessing this book's claims and reviewers' counterclaims. Within a biological family, correlations (e.g., parental socioeconomic status x child's IQ) are ambiguous because the cause of the correlation could be the family environment or the parent's genes. Within biological families, the correlation between parental socioeconomic status (SES) and child's IQ, based on a meta-analysis of the literature, is .333 (White, 1982). However, in studies where genetic effects are held constant, through twin or adoption designs, the correlation drops dramatically (Bouchard, Lykken, McGue, Segal, & Tellegen, 1990; Scarr & Weinberg, 1978). Another striking exemplar of this phenomenon is the IQ correlation between unrelated individuals reared together who share a common family environment but lack a common genetic background. When the cognitive ability of these "unrelated siblings" is measured in adulthood the correlation is zero (McGue, Bouchard, Iacono, & Lykken, 1993). Thus the correlation between parental SES and offspring IQ in biological families is due, in some measure, to genetic endowment. Consequently, when examining the relationship between IQ and a dependent variable, to "hold constant" the SES of biological parents (on the grounds that SES is a competing "environmental explanation") results in an underestimate of the true influence of IQ. As early as 1970, Paul Meehl warned that "the commonest error in handling nuisance variables of the `status' sort (e.g., income, education, locale, marriage) is the error of suppressing statistically components of variance that, being genetic, ought not be thus arbitrarily relegated to the `spurious influence' category" (pp. 393-394). In this book, intended for lay readers as well as academicians, the authors have purposefully provided simple and straightforward analyses of SES and cognitive ability. They have, in many instances, understated the role of cognitive ability by holding SES constant. We can expect to see numerous reanalyses and the presentation of many more complex models derived to support both sides of the debate. The careful reader will remember Meehl's caution when examining the data and drawing conclusions.
As we have seen, these advantages make a HUGE impact.
LOL! One can do quite well in America without attending Harvard, and similiar schools. "Fundamental fairness" is a flawed idea as defined by Summers and the like. If you can't afford to go to Harvard, there are plenty of other schools to attend at much lower cost. No one should get upset that many can't afford to go to a particular school.
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