February 17, 2021.
SlowBoring.com
I’ve never been one to report on “crazy happenings on campus” because even in my greatest moments of hippie-punching enthusiasm, I think there’s considerable value to freedom of association and letting colleges be exactly as zany as they want to be.
But here’s something I’ve noticed lately — left-wing people at the very most prestigious and exclusive institutions are adopting very high-flying rhetoric and then making or proposing changes that obviously aren’t going to change much of anything. Cornell, for example, decided last week to officially change the English Department to the Department of Literatures in English which “is part of decolonization efforts that started at Nairobi University in 1968, where the English department was renamed the Department of Literature.”
The difference here is that the whole idea of an institution of higher education in Nairobi was literally part of the project to construct an independent nation of Kenya.
Cornell, by contrast, is a school for rich kids. In data assembled by The Upshot in 2017, the median income of Cornell students’ families was over $150,000 per year. 64% of Cornell undergrads came from the top 20% of the income distribution, and you’re 2.5 times more likely to encounter a child of the top 1% on campus than a child of the bottom 20%. At Harvard, the school paper wants to fight racism with a mandatory course on racial justice, and the actual student body is even more upscale than Cornell.
I don’t really care what academic departments want to call themselves, nor do I object to some school experimenting with an antiracism class. But if you’re affiliated with an elite educational institution and are concerned with social justice issues, I think you owe it to yourself and the world to think a little more critically about the core functioning of the school.
Highly rated colleges are very rich
Most American college students don’t attend selective institutions. And a very large and growing share of students don’t fit the classic “college student” model of a full-time student between the ages of 18 and 25. In general, the fate of the highest-profile and most famous institutions of higher education are greatly overweighted in politics and media discourse. So I apologize for contributing to the problem.
That said, in this particular case, I am going to do it because these institutions control massive financial resources. The real question is whether there is something they can do to use those resources more responsibly.
If you look at The Upshot’s data for the top schools in the US News rankings, these are all places that cater to a very rich and disproportionate slice of the American population.
At Princeton, which is number one on the list, hundreds of faculty members signed a letter last summer that begins with the pronouncement that “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America” and calls for all kinds of diversity hiring, along with the creation of a special committee to “oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty.” At Northwestern, protests calling for the abolition of the campus police department led to significant acts of vandalism which were met with the retort that property destruction is a small thing compared to the overwhelming need to dismantle “a system of racial capitalism.”
Again, without casting judgment on any of these specific ideas, what you have here are a bunch of donor-financed nonprofit institutions whose most core work in the undergraduate education space is to take a bunch of upper-class children and help them further entrench their position in the upper class. The most obvious social justice question you can ask about any of them is, “Isn’t there something more worthwhile they could be trying to do? “
Financial aid is not the issue
When I was in college, need-blind admissions were a hot topic. This is the principle that a college should admit students regardless of their ability to pay and then commit to meeting the financial aid needs of whoever happens to get in.
Brown was a holdout among the Ivies on this but went need-blind in 2002. The really bleeding-edge schools like Yale and Harvard are even need-blind for international students. This is a fine idea, but what I recall reporting at the time as a student journalist is that one of the reasons it made sense was that in practice, need-conscious admissions were not actually screening out a large number of students.
The other thing is that tuition at private college is so high that “need” extends comically far up the income ladder. At Harvard, they boast that “55 percent of our undergraduates receive need-based Harvard scholarships.” But combine that with the median family income of Harvard parents and you’ll see they’ve just set tuition so high that families with above-average incomes can’t afford to pay full price. This is, in effect, a price discrimination strategy, and it works well for its narrow purposes. But it also means that unlike in an era of systematically cheaper college, scholarships aren’t primarily a vehicle for helping working-class kids get to college. So when administrators pivot the conversation to financial aid, they are basically dodging the core issue here, which is that their admissions are massively tilted toward rich kids.
Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery got detailed information from the College Board, and they show that kids with SAT/ACT scores in the top 10% of the distribution are disproportionately drawn from higher-income families and seem to be very likely to have at least one highly educated parent.1
Hoxby & Avery (2015)
We can probably debate exactly why this is until the cows come home, but from a college’s standpoint, it basically is what it is — if you want to make very high standardized test scores necessary criteria for admissions, you are going to end up with a rich-skewed student body. But even within this limited context, our colleges are doing less than they should.
Doing the minimum: Address undermatching
The punchline of that Hoxby and Avery chart is that even though kids from the bottom quartile having very high SAT/ACT scores is relatively rare, those kids are even more underrepresented than you might guess.
In fact, they show that “the vast majority of very high-achieving students who are low-income do not apply to any selective college or university,” even though high-achieving low-income students who do apply to selective colleges are admitted to and graduate college at high rates.
This is a real tragedy, because as I discussed in “The Misguided Exam School Debate,” even though everyone knows that affluent parents highly value their kids going to prestigious schools, Stacy Berg Dale and Alan Krueger find that the benefits of actually attending one are much larger if you’re poor. Basically, we have a swarm of yuppies fiercely competing to get their kids seats into highly selective schools that provide little value to them, while a huge share of smart-but-poor kids who would benefit enormously from attending a selective college doesn’t even bother to apply.
What they find is basically that prestigious colleges do a certain amount of deliberate recruiting of smart low-income kids in the community where they are located, and also that in a big school district such a kid is more likely to encounter a teacher who went to a highly selective school and encourage her to apply. But poor kids in small school districts that don’t contain a highly selective institution are very likely to just be overlooked, with nobody encouraging them to do what every yuppie kid does and apply to several schools that are well-matched to their SAT scores plus a safety school or two.
The College Board, working with Hoxby and Sarah Turner, got excited by a low-cost nudge that their research indicated could solve this problem. Unfortunately, as Matt Barnum reported back in 2019, it turned out not to work.
That said, schools committed to social justice are allowed to take steps that are more drastic than low-cost nudges! The core finding here is that America’s elite colleges could, without making any changes to their admissions standards, help a large number of talented children from low-income families. In doing so, they could displace a number of affluent kids who wouldn’t even be harmed by ending up at a less selective institution. All it would take is for someone to persuade these kids to apply. To the best of my knowledge, the top schools in America have collectively dedicated $0 to addressing this issue, which seems like the absolute least you could do in pursuit of social justice.
But you also might want to consider more drastic steps.
What if we tried to help people in need?
A fundamental paradox about this is that highly selective colleges are just a somewhat odd vehicle for social justice campaigning. Decades ago, Ivy League campuses were bastions of conservatism, which sort of made sense.
In the 1932 election, a Harvard Crimson poll of undergraduates at FDR’s alma mater showed him losing badly to Herbert Hoover. Then when he won, the students at his old dorm pranked him with a fake letter claiming that the unnamed Lowell House Bells had been renamed in his honor. That prompted an official thank you note from the White House, which I guess shows the prank worked.
A million things have changed in the intervening 90 years, and now most of the students and most of the faculty at elite colleges have left-wing political commitments.
That doesn’t mean everyone on campus agrees with the most out-there social justice demands. But it does guarantee that they will get some kind of hearing, because there is broad consensus on campus that various kinds of egalitarian ideas are correct. But far and away, the most straightforward way for a school like Harvard or Princeton to advance social justice goals is not to tweak how things work on campus, but instead to transfer some of their considerable financial and human resources to institutions that serve more pressing needs.
The Upshot, for example, found that there really are a bunch of colleges that are vehicles of upward mobility — mostly public institutions in places with a lot of immigrants.
For Stanford to just give $25 million to Cal State Los Angeles would be kind of weird, but it would also almost certainly be more efficacious than implementing $25 million worth of investments in racial equity program demands at Stanford. At a minimum, rich fancy schools with huge fundraising programs could find a “buddy” college that actually educates low-income kids and do a joint fundraiser. Princeton could pay graduate students to tutor poor high school students in Trenton instead of paying them to teach rich Princeton students.
I don’t even have a really specific idea here because the basic fact is almost anything you could do with money would be a more reasonable social justice priority than spending it on students at fancy colleges.
Beyond hypocrisy
I think conservatives tend to process this kind of obvious reality as a form of hypocrisy. It is that, but also leftist politics on elite campuses are kind of achingly sincere. Michael Sandel’s book on “The Tyranny of Merit” is really good, and I think it 100% represents what he truly believes about the flaws and perils of meritocracy. But he’s not going to quit his job as one of the most popular Harvard professors to go teach at a community college!
This stuff is just hard. Even with purely selfish stuff, it’s hard to quit smoking or to lose weight. On ethics, it’s even harder. My considered view is that I ought to radically scale back my meat consumption. What I’ve actually achieved is to modestly decrease it, while modestly increasing the extent to which I am sourcing it ethically. So I completely sympathize with everyone whose notional social commitments are at odds with the practical roles of the institutions that they are embedded in.
In other words, I don’t expect Christopher Eisgruber to say “in light of Princeton’s strong commitment to racial justice and social equality, we’re dissolving the university tomorrow and giving all the money to support high-quality preschool programs in poor communities.”
But I do think it would be constructive to acknowledge the fundamental tension between the idea of being a rich, highly exclusive school that trains the next generation of investment bankers and corporate lawyers and the idea of crusading for justice in either a socialist kind of way or a woke kind of way (or both!). It’s just not going to work. Then you can start to relieve the tension by breathing deeply and trying to be practical. You really could set a strong goal of trying to fix the undermatching thing, for starters.
These schools could also push themselves to expand the size of their undergraduate classes. The Ivy League has actually gotten way more exclusive over the past couple of generations thanks to population growth and the rise of co-education. If every elite school aimed to triple or quadruple enrollment over a reasonable span of time, the clientele serviced would necessarily end up being a bit less upscale if for no other reason than there are only so many scions of the top 1% to go around. To be really idealistic about it, they even might reconsider their fundraising priorities. How much money does Yale actually need in a world where other charities are feeding the hungry or saving desperately poor children from intestinal parasites?
There’s an old joke that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low, and I think that explains a fair amount of the on-campus fireworks. But the stakes in the decision-making of institutions with these huge endowments are actually not quite as low as it might seem — as long as they’re willing to actually open themselves up to broader questions than what to name the English Department.
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