May 24, 2011
Top Colleges, Largely for the Elite
The
last four presidents of the United
States each attended a highly selective
college. All nine Supreme Court justices did, too, as did the chief executives
of General Electric (Dartmouth), Goldman Sachs
(Harvard), Wal-Mart (Georgia Tech), Exxon Mobil (Texas)
and Google (Michigan).
Like it
or not, these colleges have outsize influence on American society. So their
admissions policies don’t matter just to high school seniors;
they’re a matter of national interest.
More than
seven years ago, a 44-year-old political scientist named Anthony Marx became
the president of Amherst College, in western Massachusetts, and set
out to change its admissions policies. Mr. Marx argued that elite colleges were
neither as good nor as meritocratic as they could be, because they mostly
overlooked lower-income students.
For all
of the other ways that top colleges had become diverse, their student bodies
remained shockingly affluent. At the University
of Michigan, more
entering freshmen in 2003 came from families earning at least $200,000 a
year than came from the entire bottom half of the income distribution. At some
private colleges, the numbers were even more extreme.
In his 2003
inaugural address, Mr. Marx —
quoting from a speech President John F. Kennedy had given at Amherst — asked, “What good is a
private college unless it is serving a great national purpose?”
On
Sunday, Mr. Marx presided over his final Amherst
graduation. This summer, he will become head of the New York Public Library.
And he can point to some impressive successes at Amherst.
More than
22 percent of students now receive federal Pell Grants (a rough approximation
of how many are in the bottom half of the nation’s income distribution).
In 2005, only 13 percent did. Over the same period, other elite colleges have
also been doing more to recruit low- and middle-income students, and they have
made some progress.
It is
tempting, then, to point to all these changes and proclaim that elite higher
education is at long last a meritocracy. But Mr. Marx doesn’t buy it. If
anything, he worries, the progress has the potential to distract people from
how troubling the situation remains.
When we
spoke recently, he mentioned a Georgetown
University study of the
class of 2010 at the country’s 193 most selective colleges. As entering
freshmen, only 15 percent of students came from the bottom half of the income
distribution. Sixty-seven percent came from the highest-earning fourth of the
distribution. These statistics mean that on many campuses affluent students
outnumber middle-class students.
“We
claim to be part of the American dream and of a system based on merit and
opportunity and talent,” Mr. Marx says. “Yet if at the top places,
two-thirds of the students come from the top quartile and only 5 percent come
from the bottom quartile, then we are actually part of the problem of the
growing economic divide rather than part of the solution.”
I think Amherst has created a
model for attracting talented low- and middle-income students that other
colleges can copy. It borrows, in part, from the University of California,
which is by far the most economically diverse top university system in the
country. But before we get to the details, I want to address a question that
often comes up in this discussion:
Does more
economic diversity necessarily mean lower admissions standards?
No, it
does not.
The truth
is that many of the most capable low- and middle-income students attend community colleges or less
selective four-year colleges close to their home. Doing so makes them less
likely to graduate from college at all, research
has shown. Incredibly, only 44 percent of low-income high school seniors
with high standardized test scores enroll in a four-year college, according to
a Century Foundation report — compared with
about 50 percent of high-income seniors who have average test scores.
“The
extent of wasted human capital,” wrote the report’s authors,
Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, “is phenomenal.”
This
comparison understates the problem, too, because SAT scores are hardly a pure
measure of merit. Well-off students often receive SAT coaching and take the
test more than once, Mr. Marx notes, and top colleges reward them for doing
both. Colleges also reward students for overseas travel and elaborate community
service projects. “Colleges don’t recognize, in the same way, if
you work at the neighborhood 7-Eleven to support your family,” he adds.
Several
years ago, William Bowen, a former president of Princeton,
and two other researchers found that top colleges gave no admissions advantage to
low-income students, despite claims to the contrary. Children of alumni
received an advantage. Minorities (except Asians) and athletes received an even
bigger advantage. But all else equal, a low-income applicant was no more likely
to get in than a high-income applicant with the same SAT score. It’s pretty
hard to call that meritocracy.
•
Amherst has
shown that building a better meritocracy is possible, by doing, as Mr. Marx
says, “everything we can think of.”
The
effort starts with financial aid. The college has devoted more of its resources
to aid, even if the dining halls don’t end up being as fancy as those at
rival colleges. Outright grants have replaced most loans, not just for poor
students but for middle-class ones. The college has started a scholarship for
low-income foreign students, who don’t qualify for Pell Grants. And Amherst officials visit
high schools they had never visited before to spread the word.
The
college has also started using its transfer program mostly to admit community
college students. This step may be the single easiest way for a college to
become more meritocratic. It’s one reason the University
of California campuses in Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego are so much more
diverse than other top colleges.
Many
community colleges have horrifically high dropout rates, but the students who
succeed there are often inspiring. They include war veterans, single parents
and immigrants who have managed to overcome the odds. At Amherst this year, 62 percent of transfer
students came from a community college.
Finally,
Mr. Marx says Amherst
does put a thumb on the scale to give poor students more credit for a given SAT
score. Not everyone will love that policy. “Spots at these places are
precious,” he notes. But I find it tough to argue that a 1,300 score for
most graduates of Phillips Exeter Academy
— or most children of Amherst alumni
— is as impressive as a 1,250 for someone from McDowell
County, W.Va., or the South Bronx.
The
result of these changes is that Amherst
has a much higher share of low-income students than almost any other elite
college. By itself, of course, Amherst
is not big enough to influence the American economy. But its policies could
affect the economy if more colleges adopted them.
The United States
no longer leads the world in educational attainment, partly because so few
low-income students — and surprisingly few middle-income students —
graduate from four-year colleges. Getting more of these students into the best
colleges would make a difference. Many higher-income students would still
graduate from college, even if they went to a less elite one. A more educated
population, in turn, would probably lift economic
growth.
The Amherst model does cost
money. And it would be difficult to maintain if Congress cuts the Pell budget,
as some members have proposed. But when you add everything up, I think the
model isn’t only the fairest one and the right one for the economy.
It’s also the best one for the colleges themselves. Attracting the best
of the best — not just the best of the affluent — and letting them
learn from one another is the whole point of a place like Amherst.
“We
did this for educational reasons,” Mr. Marx says. “We aim to be the
most diverse college in the country — and the most selective.”
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