Our Universities: The Outrageous Reality

A recent study by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard shows that the great majority of high-achieving low-income students (those scoring at or above the ninetieth percentile on standardized tests, and with high school grades of A- or higher) never apply to any selective college, much less to several, as their better-off peers typically do.3 Their numbers, which Hoxby and Avery estimate at between 25,000 and 35,000 of each year’s high school seniors, “are much greater than college admissions staff generally believe,” in part because most such students get little if any counseling in high school about the intricate process of applying to a selective college—so they rarely do.

.. Mettler points out that between 1980 and 2010, average spending on higher education slipped from 8 percent to 4 percent of state budgets.

.. a Pell grant in the 1970s covered four fifths of total cost at the average four-year public university. Today it covers less than one third.

.. One result is that graduation rates are the same for low-income students with high test scores as for high-income students with low scores.7

.. One ominous sign is that Hispanics and African-Americans, especially young men, are lagging badly behind whites in educational attainment. (see Figure 2 below) If these problems are not addressed, we are likely to become, if we are not already, what Mettler calls “a society with caste-like characteristics.”

.. Under President Obama, however, and with more aggressive scrutiny by state attorneys general, government oversight has tightened. Enrollment at the University of Phoenix has dropped by close to two thirds.

.. David Rosen, an English professor who writes that just when we “appear to be entering a new Gilded Age, with institutions of higher learning as willing or unwitting accomplices,” faculty—many of whom call themselves leftists—“seem ready to politicize everything but the immense changes occurring before their very noses.”26 Decrying inequality is commonplace on many college campuses these days, but the question seldom comes up whether the college itself is helping or hurting through its own admissions and aid practices, and if it’s the latter, what might be done about it.

A Prudent College Path: Honors Colleges

“Because of the broader student body at a public university, there’s a lot more reach in terms of the type of people you’re going to encounter,” John Willingham, the author of the book and the architect of the website, told me.

And it’s likely that at a public university’s honors college, there will be a smaller percentage of students from extremely wealthy families than at one of the most highly selective private schools.

Two Cheers for Capitalism

Anand suggested that in these days of growing income inequality, this approach is no longer good enough. “Sometimes I wonder,” he said, “whether these various forms of giving back have become to our era what the papal indulgence was to the Middle Ages: a relatively inexpensive way of getting oneself seemingly on the right side of justice, without having to alter the fundamentals of one’s life.”

The winners of our age, he continued, may be helping society with their foundations, but in their business enterprises, the main occupation of their life, they are doing serious harm. First they are using political and financial muscle to enact policies that help them “stack up, protect and bequeath the money.”

Second, they offload risks and volatility onto workers. Uber’s owners have a lot of security but they deny any responsibility for their workers’ “lives, health, desire for career growth.”

Third, the owners of capital are increasingly remote from their communities. “In the old days, if a company C.E.O. suddenly dumped the defined-benefits pension, you knew who to go see to complain. Today it may be an unseen private equity fund that lobbies for the change.” The virtualization of ownership insulates the privileged from the “devastating consequences” of their decisions.