Many of us know at least one wealthy person whose kids spent a week in India or Tanzania building houses or digging latrines. Bizarrely, I know of a family that travelled to a nameless developing country on their private jet on precisely that quest. Competitive volunteering as a means of glamorising résumés for Ivy League applications long ago reached absurd heights. The ideal student would play concert-level violin, cure river blindness, win yachting competitions and get intensively coached into high SAT scores. At some point, the system has to collapse under the weight of its self-parody. I don’t know how close that moment is, or what a revolution in university admissions would precisely look like. But the data keeps pouring in.
The latest is a study by Harvard’s Raj Chetty, David Deming and John Friedman on “The determinants and causal effects of admission to highly selective private colleges”. Don’t let the dry title put you off. The paper’s evidence of the system’s acute bias towards the wealthy — the higher up the income scale, the greater the chances of admission with the same test scores as lower-income applicants — is dynamite. This is a Swamp Note so I won’t weigh you down with the paper’s methodology. Anyone interested on how they reached their findings should read The Economist’s breakdown here, or the New York Times here. But you can take it as read that the data is copper-bottomed.
I very much hope that legal challenges to the system of Ivy League legacy admissions will win in court. A few weeks ago I wrote a column saying that any disruption to a morally broken system, including the Supreme Court’s overturning of race-based affirmative action, has to be a good thing. I received more positive emails — literally in their hundreds — than on anything comparable I have recently written.
Let me quote from one of the few that took issue with me, who will remain anonymous. “Legacy students themselves are a huge asset to these schools,” said my correspondent.
“People want to attend an Ivy League school not just for the education — you can get an excellent education elsewhere for far less — but for early access to the circle of empowerment these families and their generational wealth represent. If you get rid of them, the Ivy League will wither away. These students, not the professors, are 100% their major advantage, and a key attraction for others who want to break through to these circles. Networking matters and college is where you form life-long bonds. In other words legacy students are a feature not a bug of this system. In fact they are the system. And the colleges know that.”
On reflection, I am not sure we do disagree. Institutions do not voluntarily harm themselves. The message of this email was that the Ivy League would do what it takes within the law to perpetuate the basis of its vast money machines.
Rana, I think this is an issue on which we agree. Beyond abolishing the preference for legacy applicants, which I consider to be oligarchic and should be deemed un-American, I do not have a ready-made solution to the problem. But I do have certain biases. Universities are centres of learning, not of sport, so they should also get rid of athletics scholarships. The basis of admission must include socio-economic status, such as family income, whether the applicant would be a first generation college student, and other measures of adversity.
In my column I complained about the fact that the US education debate is monopolised by the admissions policies for schools that take in less than one per cent of students. The other 99 per cent, who go to public universities, other private schools, community colleges, or (in the case of the majority) end their studies after leaving high school, are getting badly short-changed. Yet the composition of America’s elite, and the unfairness with which it self-renews, is an important issue of public interest for America’s democracy. When a system is correctly perceived to be rigged in favour of insiders, a backlash will eventually come. Rana, what are your solutions to this problem?
Recommended reads
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My column this week looks at why Joe Biden is not yet getting the credit for what is an otherwise impressive macroeconomic picture — the US has rebounded from the pandemic better than any other major economy, including China. The problem is the impact of inflation on middle class incomes: “America’s feel-bad Biden boom”.
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While we are on education, Gillian Tett has a thoughtful and original column on the “white flight” from California’s public schools — this time it’s not a flight from African-Americans or Hispanics allegedly dragging down public school standards, but from Asians who are pushing them up. As Gillian puts it, these trends are a “foretaste of the tensions that will keep poisoning the politics of American education for a long time.”
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Finally, do read my colleague Martin Wolf’s column on India’s illiberal direction under Narendra Modi. I agree with every word of the following lines: “For someone who has long admired the vigour and diversity of Indian democracy, this growing illiberalism is depressing,” writes Martin. “It is particularly depressing given India’s rising role in the world. I can see no good reason why a predominantly Hindu society should not tolerate minority faiths. I can see no reason either why it has to assail a diverse civil society. Yet that is where the Modi government seems to be going.”
Rana Foroohar responds
Ed, this is a topic near and dear to me, as I’m currently looking at colleges for my younger son, a rising senior in high school. I wrote a column two weeks ago, arguing that the Supreme Court rulings to get rid of affirmative action and prohibiting Biden’s student debt jubilee would actually be a good thing for the country (contrary to much of the progressive buzz) because it would force an economic reckoning with a system that is hugely broken. When not only working class, but middle class and even upper middle class people find the price of college financially ruinous, you have a structural problem and a bipartisan political issue that must be addressed.
I could literally have retired today (not that I would, because I love my job) if I hadn’t had to save for eight years of private college fees for two children. Many people I know are in the same position, and cumulatively, that starts to have a very distorting effect on the economy. Boomers and Gen Xers delay retirement, which creates a sort of Italian-style labour market, in which older people are holding on to jobs for longer, even as younger people are taking on more debt for things like education and housing.
The reasons for dysfunction in our college system are deep and broad and go back decades. Basically, a debt-driven arms race (in part fuelled by our own government) to attract a much larger, richer group of students to US colleges, coupled with the Koch Brothers’ efforts to cut state funding for public schools, coupled with liberals turning away from vocational education as “class based” tracking, has led to the massive inflation in higher education and the student debt crisis we have now.
So, what would I do? For starters, I agree that we must move from race to class as a basis for financial aid and admissions. Not only would it be fairer, but it would start to expose all sorts of problematic gaming of the admissions system. Here’s just one example of that gaming. Many affluent children are offered “merit” aid to go to second or third-tier schools, meaning that those schools’ sticker price (with full-freight tuition, housing and meals) goes from, say, the nearly $80,000 you might pay for Harvard or Stanford or University of Chicago, to something more manageable, like maybe $45-50K. It boosts the schools’ coffers and often the geographic-diversity numbers of schools that are trying to raise their profiles. But there’s no merit here to speak of, even if the children themselves are worthy.
I’d also agree that we need to rethink college athletics. I’m not sure I’d get rid of athletic scholarships — I will take a classical approach here and say that I think competitive sports and the discipline of athleticism can help grow a well-rounded individual. I was a competitive figure skater and got a lot from being on the ice at 5am for years on end.
Finally, I think we need to bring education and the real world a lot closer. I really like how various schools like, say, Northeastern, are making work experience a primary part of college. It’s no wonder that this university, which used to be an also-ran commuter school, now has a record number of undergrad admissions. People know they’ll be able to pay back student debt because they’ll have a good job when they come out. On that score, I taught a course at Columbia University Journalism School, which is probably the best in its field globally, in the evenings last winter. The programme and my peers were excellent, but I came away thinking that students would do better economically if they volunteered to work at a global newspaper (like, say, the FT!) for free for a year, rather than paying an expensive school to give them a credential.
Your feedback
And now a word from our Swampians . . .
In response to “Ukraine’s frustrating summer”:
“Kindly note that the US neoconservatives (with plenty of enthusiastic support from the UK) are doing their bit to destroy Ukraine. By pushing relentlessly for Nato’s eventual enlargement to Ukraine, and for escalation rather than negotiations, the neoconservatives are exposing once again their recklessness and heedlessness. The US role in Ukraine’s destabilisation is an old, sad and oft-repeated story of US foreign policy, recalling the US role in destabilising Iran, Congo (today’s DRC), Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Serbia and Venezuela, to name just a few cases.” — Jeffrey Sachs
In response to “America’s identity crisis”:
“Ms Foroohar cited a Pew Research poll when claiming that the world has an overall positive perception of the US. I found it curious that she took opinions from predominately rich countries to be representative of the global population. For instance, Pew included neither China nor India despite being the two largest nations. The Democracy Perception Index, which polls over 50,000 people in 53 nations, found the overall positive perception of the US to be a net 27 per cent, whilst the net positive perception of its impact on global democracy was 18 per cent.” — Marcos Imbillicieri
Read the full article here
