Most highly rated colleges say they seek qualified low-income students. But a vast majority enroll very few. At the most competitive colleges, only 17 percent of students are poor enough to receive the federal education stipends known as Pell Grants. That’s just one percentage point higher than in 2000.
.. At Vassar, by contrast, 24 percent of the student body qualifies for Pell grants.
.. At the country’s most selective schools, three percent of students come from families in the bottom economic quartile, while the top economic quartile supplies 72 percent. A high-achieving poor student is only one-third as likely to go to a competitive school as her wealthier counterpart.
.. A student who could get into a top school is nearly twice as likely to graduate there than if she goes to a noncompetitive school. The top colleges are the only ones where students of all income levels graduate at the same rates. The reason is money: Selective colleges are richer. They can afford to provide specialized counseling and lots of financial aid. And running out of money is the most common reason people drop out.
.. the share of low-income students at highly selective colleges could rise by 30 to 60 percent with no decrease in academic quality
.. Tied to money is the death grip of U.S. News & World Report’s much-criticized college rankings. Colleges seek to move up in the rankings by competing on selectivity, student test scores, alumni giving and academic spending, among other metrics on which colleges do best when they stick to privileged students.
.. The college ranking system of The Washington Monthlyprovides a valuable alternative. It rates colleges for their contribution to the public good, considering (in addition to graduation rates, which U.S. News also looks at) the percentage of students from low-income families, innovative research and the percentage of students who do national service.
.. Harvard’s admission rate for these legacies, for example, is four times higher than for regular applicants. There is no more direct way to perpetuate privilege.
.. Most controversially, even affirmative action can discriminate against the poor, the report said. Nearly 90 percent of African-American students at selective colleges, some of whom were admitted through racial preferences, are middle- or upper-class.
.. Vassar was founded to serve another group that wasn’t accepted at elite colleges: women. Traditionally, white, wealthy Protestant women.
.. Part of the aid for needy students came from ending merit aid, which often went to students who didn’t need it.
.. American colleges get large government subsidies to help them provide social mobility for all. They benefit from Pell Grants and federal loans. Colleges get huge tax breaks for their nonprofit status. “Some 25 to 35 percent of our revenues probably come from these privileges,”
.. need-blind is the wrong approach: instead, colleges should givepriority to low-income students. The True Merit report argues that it is relatively easy for a wealthy student at a prep school to get top grades and test scores. A poor student from a poor school who does so must be someone with unusual amounts of grit and tenacity. “Current admissions fail to acknowledge this difference,”
The Most Career-Minded Generation
Compared to 30 years ago, young people today are much more likely to say they’re going to college to secure a good job and steady pay.
.. According to admissions departments’ informational pamphlets, the primary reason for attending college is rather noble: Campus is a place to discover one’s interests and strengths, a place for both personal and intellectual development. But in recent years, another narrative has taken hold—that what matters is return on investment. In other words: What kind of job-market value does a graduate get from a college degree?
.. Twenge said that she and Donnelly sorted the reasons provided for going to college as being either extrinsic or intrinsic.
.. The researchers do note, however, that the reasons to go to college became more extrinsic at the same time and at the same pace as income inequality increased. It’s not conclusive, but, they write, “Millennial students’ focus on making more money may be a practical consideration.”
.. “Education is the only product that the ‘consumer’ seems to want less of (many students would be happy to get A’s for no work). And if the student sees college as transactional—‘I pay my money; you give me my degree’—they are actually getting less of the product they are paying for (an education).
Do American Universities Discriminate Against Conservatives?
Two scholars discuss the ups and downs of life as a right-leaning professor
“I don’t think I can say it too strongly, but literally it just changed my life,” said a scholar, about reading the work of Ayn Rand. “It was like this awakening for me.”
Different versions of this comment appear throughout Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn Sr.’s book on conservative professors, Passing on the Right, usually about people like Milton Friedman and John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Hayek. The scholars they interviewed speak in a dreamy way about these nerdy celebrities, perhaps imagining an alternate academic universe—one where social scientists can be freely conservative.
.. If anything was a common theme among all the different camps you describe, it’s distaste for mass culture—a populist conservatism.
.. Green: You isolate a lot of area studies and identity studies: Women & Gender Studies, Africana studies, fields that focus on race and intersectionality issues. You say in your book that even moderates wouldn’t be welcome there, let alone dyed-in-the-wool conservatives. Why do you think it is that conservatives aren’t welcome in those fields—or, perhaps, why aren’t conservative academics interested in those fields?
Dunn: With some of them, there’s a political orientation built into the field itself, so that’s what excludes conservatives. If conservatism doesn’t line up with the orientation, then conservatives aren’t going to be welcome and are not going to be fit. But I don’t know that it’s the case that conservatives aren’t interested in sex and gender or race.
.. They’re much more likely to gravitate toward the natural sciences as undergraduates; they’re much more likely to gravitate toward economics.
.. There’s a survey that was done at the University of Colorado which found Republicans much more likely to feel uncomfortable in the classroom in the social sciences.
.. I think they don’t like the way those topics are studied. They don’t like the theoretical machinery brought to bear on them—things like intersectionality. Their critique of intersectionality would not be that it’s interested in gender and race—it’s this clunky machinery that doesn’t fit very well with the empirical world. It can’t explain why black men are doing so much worse than black women, or why women now get more college education and more college degrees.
.. For many conservatives, they view great works of literature as a source of wisdom that we should be grateful for and approach humbly. They think that some of the focus on race, sex, and class—they call it the holy trilogy—seems to denigrate these great works and minimizes them.
.. It took sociologists a long time to come around to the view that two-parent families were good for children on average. One reason is that they thought that social institutions are inherently oppressive things: Traditional marriage is necessarily coercive, and it stymied our liberty and freedom and it was an institution that promoted gender inequality.
.. With Regnerus, I don’t know that many people would want to engage in the same kind of data gathering that he did, lest it lead to results that aren’t palatable to others in their discipline.
.. Whig history: There’s been this natural expansion of liberty, and if you look at the progressive movement, there were the good people, who were the progressives, and then there were those who try to obstruct them. It turns out that it’s much more complicated than that, and it’s only recently that scholars, economists, and historians have explored some of the darker parts of the progressive movement. The eugenics component of the progressive movement, for example, has largely been unexplored
Excerpt: Frank Bruni’s ‘Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be’
Acceptance rates are prominently featured in the profiles of schools that appear in various reference books and surveys, including the raptly monitored one by U.S. News & World Report, whose annual rankings of American colleges factor in those rates slightly. Colleges know that many prospective applicants equate a lower acceptance rate with a more coveted, special and brag-worthy experience, and these colleges endeavor to bring their rates down by ratcheting up the number of young people who apply. They bang the drums like never before. From the organization that administers the SAT, they buy the names of students who have scored above a certain mark and are at least remotely plausible, persuadable applicants, then they send those students pamphlets and literature that grow glossier and more alluring — that leafy quadrangle! those gleaming microscopes! — by the year.
.. a surfeit of applications “became a way to promote your college, and the admis
.. The emissaries are ginning up desire in order to frustrate it, instilling hope only to quash it. In other words, their come-on is successful if it sows more failure.
.. An email that Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute sent unbidden to one high school senior invited him “to apply with Candidate’s Choicestatus!” (The boldface letters and the exclamation point are Rensselaer’s, not mine.) “Exclusively for select students, the Candidate’s Choice Application is unique to Rensselaer, and is available online now,” ..
.. There are places like Tulane that will send everyone a ‘V.I.P.’ application.”