|
Comment on this article
The Selectivity Squeeze
Since
his days as Bill Clinton's secretary of labor, the former president's
Law School classmate has come to believe that higher education's
pursuit of ever-higher admissions standards is making Americans
less equal.
by
Robert Reich '73JD
December 2000
Robert B. Reich '73JD teaches at Brandeis University. This article
is adapted from one that appeared in the September 15 edition of
the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Not
long ago, the president of a prestigious university (not the one
in which I now teach) was explaining his strategy to me. "We're
very selective, but we need to become even more selective," he said.
"Our SAT's are rising, but not as fast as I'd like. We should be
on par with.," and he named several institutions even more selective
than the one he led. "We're going to market ourselves more intensively
to high-school stars," he told me.
I asked him about
his new capital campaign, and how much of the money raised would go to awarding
scholarships to needy students or expanding the size of the entering class. Apparently,
none. "We're going to build a new student center, upgrade the dorms, and use the
rest to attract some faculty and student stars," he answered. "That's what our
competitors are doing. We can't afford not to."
I nodded sympathetically.
Still, it struck me that, if most college presidents were thinking the same way,
the competition for the best and brightest (measured in conventional ways) was
going to become more heated than it already is, and a lot of children from lower-income
families weren't going to stand a chance.
Meanwhile, children
from middle-income families continue to apply to four-year colleges in ever greater
numbers, and competition for admission to the most selective and prestigious institutions
is rising steeply. Acceptance rates at the most selective institutions are dropping, even though high-school guidance counselors have been trying to make students
more realistic about their chances. For example, in 1980 Yale accepted 26 percent
of its applicants; the most recent data show Yale accepting 16 percent. Parents
and students are similarly finding out that Stanford accepts only 13 percent of
its applicants these days; 20 years ago, it accepted 19 percent. The pattern has
been much the same at prestigious state universities like the University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor, where the rate of acceptance dropped from 72 percent to 59 percent
over the same interval, or at the University of California at Berkeley, where
acceptances plummeted from 70 to 28 percent.
With colleges seeking
to be more selective, and more students seeking admission to the most selective,
it's no surprise that the pressure on students and their families is rising. Even
sixth graders are feeling it, according to a front-page story in the New York
Times this summer. The father of one 11-year-old introduced the boy to a university
admissions officer, who advised him to take Spanish rather than Latin and to sign
up for calculus as soon as possible. Other sixth graders are surfing college home
pages on the Web, eyeing future majors and financial-aid opportunities.
That such competitive
pressures are building, among both colleges and their prospective students, seems
an accepted aspect of contemporary American life. Yet, in my view, inadequate
attention is being paid to the larger social consequences of the trend—especially
to how higher-education resources are being allocated in this era of widening
inequality.
Two broad forces
are behind the headlong rush toward greater selectivity. The most basic is that
the economic stakes of getting a degree from a reputable four-year college or
university have become much higher, as disparities in income and wealth have widened
nationwide. By the end of the 1990s, according to data contained in the Census
Bureau's annual Current Population Survey, the income gap between the top and
bottom 10 percent of earners was wider than at any time since the 1920's. During
the prosperous 1990s, the incomes of people at or near the top grew twice as fast
as those in the middle, while the wealthiest 10 percent of families got about
85 percent of the value of all the gains in the booming stock market, and the
wealthiest 1 percent got over 40 percent of the gains. Such changes have large
consequences: At the end of the 20th century, the richest 1 percent of American
families, comprising 2.7 million people, had just about as many dollars to spend,
after they had paid all taxes, as the bottom 100 million. And they owned most
of America's marketable assets. That represents the largest concentration of both
income and wealth in more than a century. The purpose of college shouldn't be
solely about earning a good income after graduation, of course, but the growing
correlation between the amount of education and the level of earnings is striking.
In 1998, according to the Census Bureau, the average income of families headed
by someone with no more than a high-school diploma was $48,434, which was 8 percent
higher than it had been in 1990 (adjusted for inflation). But family income was
$63,524 when the household head had a two-year-college degree, 10 percent higher
than in 1990. A B.A. lifted family income to $85,423, marking a 13-percent increase;
an M.A. raised earnings to $101,670, a 17-percent jump. With a professional degree,
family income was $147,170, a whopping 24-percent increase from 1990.
It should not be
surprising, then, that more high-school seniors are seeking to attend college—and more are graduating. But that's not all: Parents and their offspring also
assume that future earnings will be higher with a degree from a more selective
institution. They figure that future employers will use institutional selectivity
as a proxy for the quality of a prospective employee, and that prestigious institutions
will offer an abundance of valuable connections to the job market. While the assumption
of a direct correlation between selectivity and future earnings is not borne out
by research, the tenacity with which it's held says much about how parents view
the opportunities and risks faced by young people today. Middle-class and upper-middle-class
boomers are determined to do whatever is necessary to increase the chances that
their youngsters will do well in the new economy.
The second reason
for the lurch toward selectivity has to do with technologies that are knitting
together the nation—and the globe. More students than ever are competing nationally
(and some internationally) for admission to the same limited set of colleges and
universities. Two decades ago, bright high-school seniors with good records typically
aimed for the best university in their state or region. But rapidly improving
technologies of information, transportation, and communication are on their way
to creating a single national, and eventually global, market for higher education.
Today, high-school
students and their parents have an abundance of comparative data about colleges—including standardized ratings such as the annual listings compiled by U.S.
News & World Report as well as a flood of information available on the Internet.
As a result, bright high-school seniors with good grades and test scores are more
likely to apply to the big national brands, competing for admission with other
students from around the country. Even the sixth graders in the Times's sample
worried about attending a local or regional university. One child intoned, "C
is community college, B is state college, A is Ivy League school."
At the same time,
and for much the same reason, every major college and university wants a reputation
for being among the places that attract the nation's best and brightest. And colleges
and universities have access to much more information than they used to about
who and where those students are, and they are able to communicate with prospects
with ever greater ease.
What does all this
mean for us as a society? The danger is that the increasing competition—to
be selected and to be selective—will exacerbate the widening inequalities that
are raising the stakes in the first place. There is no single, simple cause of
the growing inequality in the United States, but a large part of it relates to
supply and demand. In the old economy that dominated the 20th century, profits
and productivity gains depended on making more and more of the same thing. Large
numbers of production workers were needed to undertake relatively routine tasks.
Those workers did not, in general, require much education. In the new economy
of the 21st century, by contrast, businesses depend largely on innovation. To
stay competitive, they have to generate products and services that are better
or cheaper than those of their rivals, and they must innovate faster than their
rivals. Thus, demand is growing for people who can spur innovation by identifying
and solving new problems or figuring out what clients and customers might need
or want.
Even though more
young people than ever are attending postsecondary institutions, the demand for
workers with the education and skills needed to innovate is rising faster than
the supply. By contrast, demand for people with relatively few skills and little education is static or shrinking. And such people are in abundant supply; in fact,
many of them can be readily replaced with overseas labor or smart machines. Those
trends help explain why the incomes of people with more education have been increasing
faster than the incomes of people with less education. As long as the economy
remains reasonably healthy, less-educated people will continue to have jobs—but their jobs will pay comparatively little.
A society concerned
about widening inequality—and its corrosive effects on democracy, social solidarity,
and the moral authority of a nation—would logically turn its attention to increasing
the supply of people capable of doing the work that the new economy rewards. It
would, in particular, do so by broadening access to postsecondary education for
children from lower-income families.
Yet almost all the
increase in the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds in postsecondary institutions
in recent years is attributable to children from middle and upper-income families.
As the economist Thomas Kane has noted, from 1977 to 1993, about 70 percent of
18- and 19-year-olds from families with incomes in the top quarter attended postsecondary
institutions, and that percentage has been rising since then. Slightly more than
50 percent of children from families in the second-highest quartile attended,
and 50 percent of children from families in the quartile below that did so. But
less than 30 percent of children from families in the bottom quarter enrolled
in postsecondary education—a percentage that has been dropping since 1993, even as college enrollments among more affluent students have been rising.
There is a danger
that the current competitive rush toward selectivity will make it even less likely
that lower-income children will gain access to higher education. That's because
college and university administrators have incentives to spend more resources
to attract those whom they consider the best students, rather than accommodating
more lower-income students whose credentials and test scores do not add to an
institution's luster.
Too many colleges
and universities are using scarce scholarship resources to lure student stars,
who often come from advantaged families and good secondary schools—and who
already have every chance of succeeding in life. In fact, an increasing number
of institutions are engaging in quiet bidding wars for such students. The New
York Times reported last year that Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, for example, explicitly reassures star applicants that it will match or surpass any
offers they receive from other colleges. "We believe competition among schools
is healthy," Carnegie Mellon's admissions director was quoted as saying. "We are
trying to encourage dialogue, and we have set aside enough dough to do it." Harvard's
admissions materials hint at a similar policy: "We expect that some of our students
will have particularly attractive offers from the institutions with new aid programs,"
it writes to newly admitted students, "and those students should not assume that
we will not respond."
Harvard's almost-bottomless endowment allows it to match any bid without skimping on aid to
needier students, but that's not the case for most colleges. What's
doled out to the stars is almost certainly given at the expense
of some needier students who qualify academically, but cannot afford
the costs. Across the country, "need-blind"
admissions policies are vanishing. "It used to be, providing aid
was a charitable operation," Michael S. McPherson, the president
of Macalester College, told the Times. "Now, it's an investment,
like brand management."
A second way that
colleges and universities have been pumping up the applicant pool of good students,
ratcheting up average SAT scores, and enhancing selectivity is through direct
marketing to high schools and families in the middle-class and upper-middle-class
communities where high achievers can easily be found. An increasing slice of university
budgets is now dedicated to mailings, brochures, visits by recruiters to suburban
high schools, telephoners, elaborately staged visiting days on campuses, Web pages,
and videos. Similarly, money for recruiting minority candidates is often aimed
at middle-class African American and Asian American families already intent on
sending their children to college. Such marketing invites similar responses from
competing institutions, in what has become an escalating round of promotion.
Here, too, the result
is often less money to finance the much harder job of recruiting high-school students
from outside the mainstream—diamonds in the rough who could benefit enormously
from college but who don't know it because they and their families are too poor,
or their high-school teachers and administrators too overwhelmed, to become aware
of the possibility; or because their performance on standardized tests may not
reveal their real promise.
The same competition
for the best students is driving many colleges and universities to expand and
upgrade student centers, improve campus landscaping, make current dormitories
more comfortable, and add other amenities. Administrators argue that they must
do so in order to keep up with other colleges in attracting star students and
improving institutional rankings. But when such expenditures are passed on to
students in the form of higher costs, the consequence is reduced accessibility
for needy students who cannot afford the tab.
Alternatively, those expenditures are financed from the proceeds of capital campaigns, which might
otherwise be used to expand enrollments and provide more scholarship assistance
to the needy. One administrator (again, I should note, not at the institution
in which I now teach) explained the logic to me in commendably candid terms: "Our
goal is not to add more students but to reject more students. If anything, we
want a smaller entering class. That way, we look more selective."
Public resources
are not being allocated to counter such trends. From 1988 to 1998, according to
the Digest of Education Statistics, the average price of attending a public college
or university rose 22 percent, after adjusting for inflation (it rose 28 percent
at private colleges and universities).
The new fashion among
states to provide merit awards to high-school students who score well on standardized examinations is not helping, because children from lower-income families are less
likely to succeed on such tests than are students from higher-income families.
Last spring, for example, 63 percent of white high-school students who took the
Michigan Educational Assessment Program test qualified for a $2,500 Michigan merit
scholarship, while only 2.2 percent of African American students who took the
test qualified. Most of the white students were from families with higher incomes
than the families of the African American students.
If we are serious
about reversing the larger trend toward widening inequality of income and wealth
in the United States—or, at the very least, about slowing it—we need to
make it easier, not harder, for children from relatively poor families to gain
access to postsecondary education. As institutions of higher education, as well
as state legislatures, debate issues such as how to allocate student aid, recruit
students, prioritize capital construction, and even create a presence on the Internet,
they need to keep in mind the importance of making higher education available
across the economic spectrum.
In light of the nation's
widening inequalities of income and wealth, it seems to me that scarce scholarship
resources should be reserved for students who need them, rather than for student
stars who do not. Colleges should refrain from informally bidding against one
another for stars, and from spending significant resources marketing themselves
to middle-class families who already are being marketed to death. Resources should
be used, instead, to recruit potential students from lower-income families, for
whom a college education would be beneficial, but who do not show that by conventional
measures. And rather than spending funds on amenities that make campuses more
attractive to middle-class children whose families can bear the added costs, colleges
should keep a lid on tuition, room, and board so that more lower-income kids could
afford to attend. Colleges and universities might also consider how to efficiently expand their enrollments to provide better access to more students at lower cost.
That could include using the Internet to extend the reach of instructional programs
to people who now have little or no access to higher education.
Some people will
say that the competitive pressures forcing colleges and universities toward more
selectivity cannot be reversed. I accept that some institutional competition is
inevitable, even desirable. But I see no inherent reason why the terms of competition
must converge on standardized test scores, numerical rankings in such publications
as U.S. News & World Report, or any such uniform calculus. Institutional success
could as well be measured in ways that better respond to the nation's problem
of widening inequality—for example, by reference to the proportion of promising
new admits from lower-income families.
If the challenge
is framed more broadly—as how to help more young people from lower-income families
gain the skills they need to succeed in the new economy—other directions may
suggest themselves. For example, colleges and universities might offer associate
degrees in various technical fields; or they might "adopt" high schools in some
of the poorer communities in their regions. They could encourage undergraduates
to tutor students in those communities and professors to give refresher courses
to the high-school faculties, and they could aim scholarships and admissions slots
at promising students from those schools. (To its credit, Yale already does the
last three.)
By the same token,
state legislatures could expand resources and provide more scholarships for students
at community colleges and technical institutes that offer skills that are in demand.
More states could also adopt variations of plans, already in effect in some areas,
to grant automatic admission to the top public universities to all state students
graduating at the tops of their high-school classes. Because lower-income students
increasingly tend to be concentrated in lower-income communities, such policies
would enhance the access of those students to college.
The rush
toward selectivity and exclusivity in higher education is exactly
the wrong direction to take for a society that is already becoming
less equal, and in which higher education is the fault line separating
winners from losers. We should—and can—reverse course. |
|