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Color and Money
How Rich White Kids Are Winning the War over College Affirmative Action
By Peter Schmidt Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2007 Peter Schmidt
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-230-60740-8
CHAPTER 1
Skimming the Top How Money Rises Above Merit
"And to the C students I say, You, too, can be President of the United States."
—George W. Bush, Yale University commencement address, June 2001
Bear with me as I walk you through a thought experiment.
Do you remember the cheap cardboard "X-Ray Glasses," advertised in comic books as giving you the power to see through the skin of everyone around you? Imagine opening a magazine and finding an advertisement that says:
"Smarts" detecting glasses! Be able to see who is elite college material!
And suppose that you order a pair for kicks, only to slide them on and discover that, lo and behold, the darned things actually work.
When you put the glasses on, you can easily spot people with the intellectual qualities top colleges say they look for, such as the ability to consistently earn excellent grades and test scores; or brilliance in a certain field, like physics; or the sorts of leadership skills one sees in class presidents; or even artistic gifts such as virtuosity at the violin. Through your lenses, those with such traits have a certain aura or glow to them. You can see it emanating from well-regarded surgeons, leading high-tech researchers, business executives who successfully steer big companies, and lawyers who rise to partner in large firms.
Now imagine that you decide to really put your glasses to work by visiting a prestigious four-year college or university, one selective enough to be consistently ranked by the widely used Barron's Profiles of American Colleges in one of its top two tiers. Because there are roughly 160 such colleges around the nation and they vary greatly in their size, program offerings, and student populations, let's try to come up with an imaginary college that represents a composite of nearly all of them, at least in terms of its admissions criteria and its student body. Given its reputation for serving the intellectual elite, let's call it Briterdan U.
At first you keep your glasses tucked in your pocket, just to see how Briterdan's students look without them. You'll notice that Briterdan is much whiter and more Asian than the world just outside its gates. Its enrollment is about 77 percent white, 11 percent Asian American, 6 percent Hispanic, and 6 percent black. It has few, if any, Native American students.
When you put the glasses on, you end up feeling amazed—not at the sight of so many students who shine brightly, but at the sight of so many students with no glow to them at all. As you walk around campus, 15 percent of the undergraduates that you encounter will be white students with no aura. That's more than one out of every seven undergraduates, and nearly one out of every five white ones. If everyone out there were to put on a pair of your glasses, the single largest minority group on campuses would be dim white kids.
That 15 percent estimate is based on the research of Anthony Carnevale, a prominent education researcher and former vice president of the Educational Testing Service, and Stephen Rose, a research economist who also worked there. In the course of a broader study on whether class-based affirmative action might work, they decided to look into how many of the students on selective college campuses actually met the admissions criteria that those institutions claimed to use. They constructed a hypothetical, merit-based admissions process for each of 146 colleges in Barron's top two tiers—based entirely on those colleges' advertised academic standards—and then fed the academic profiles of the colleges' students through it. Their academic-merit-based admissions models rejected that white 15 percent just as surely as you or I might spit out bad sushi.
How did that subset of students get in? Carnevale says that colleges did not provide the sort of data that could tell him, so one has to extrapolate the answer from other research and whatever else is known about the college admissions field. He says a sizable share of the 15 percent consists of athletes, but many more gained admission based on some personal connection—either they were related to alumni, or they were the child of some college employee, or strings were pulled on their behalf by a donor, a college official, or a politician.
The number-crunching performed by Carnevale and Rose also produced some bad news regarding minority students. If the selective colleges were to consider only academic qualifications—as measured by grades, test scores, teacher recommendations, and demonstrated leadership ability—their total black enrollments probably would plunge from 6 percent to 1.6 percent, while their Hispanic enrollments would fall from 6 percent to 2.4 percent. Although Asian American students generally don't benefit from affirmative action, their share of the enrollments of such institutions also would drop, from more than 11 percent to about 7 percent. The researchers attributed the anticipated decline in Asian numbers to the willingness of many Asian families to push hard to get their children into the best college available, which results in a number of them occupying college seats passed up by students who were more qualified but less eager.
Wearing your "smarts" detecting glasses thus would offer you an insight into one of the chief ironies of the affirmative action debate. Because blacks and Hispanics are more likely than others to receive admissions preferences, many whites who are rejected by colleges wrongly assume that a less qualified minority applicant took their seat. Because the admissions preferences that whites benefit from are largely hidden and offered only to some, few people ever question whether a given white student on campus is academically underqualified, and you almost never hear a rejected white applicant complain that he or she lost out to a less deserving white student.
The colleges in Barron's top two tiers serve about 15 percent of all of the nation's four-year college students. Another 20 percent of students enroll in the next tier down—colleges that generally require applicants to have at least a B-average and solid SAT or ACT scores, and that reject one-fourth to one-half of their applicants. The next tier below that—colleges that require at least a C average and comparable test scores, and that reject less than one-fourth of applicants—register about 40 percent. Although plenty of very bright people find a place at third- or fourth-tier institutions and go on to lead fulfilling lives, it is also the case that many colleges in these tiers lower the bar for some students while turning away others with better qualifications.
Put aside the "smarts" detecting glasses for a moment, and now imagine opening a magazine and seeing an advertisement for yet another strange breakthrough in optometry. This one says:
Privilege detecting glasses! See how advantaged people were as children!
Encouraged by your last experience, you order a pair of these and discover that they too work as advertised. The instructions packaged with them rightly caution, however, that the detection of privilege is a fairly tricky business. The glasses have shortcomings in that they cannot tell you whether someone's parents were loving or abusive, or whether there was someone else in their young life, perhaps an older sibling or grandparent, who offered them support. But the glasses are sophisticated enough that they don't just measure parental income. They also account for parental occupation, and they detect how well educated someone's parents were—a variable found by education researchers to play a bigger role than parental income in determining educational achievement. They'll show the child of rich Harvard MBAs to be better off than the child of middleclass Harvard MBAs, but they won't trick you into seeing the 17-year-old child of two janitors who just won $100,000 in the lottery as better off than the child of two physicians who just went broke as a result of a bad investment.
When you put the glasses on, you can see a blue tint—hinting at blue blood, perhaps—in the skin of people who grew up in the most privileged fourth of society (or what social scientists refer to as "the top socioeconomic quartile"). You see the green of money in the faces of those who grew up in the next quartile down, whose parents generally had at least some college education and live fairly comfortably. People from the third quartile down, coming mainly from working-class families, exhibit a red tint. Those who grew up in the bottom quartile, whose parents were poorly educated and struggle to pay their bills, end up looking yellow.
It occurs to you that by wearing your new glasses around Briterdan U., you might gain some insight into what role selective colleges play in determining where people get in life. You look forward to sighting yellow or red people on Briterdan's campus as evidence that it is helping people rise above their circumstances and fulfill their dreams.
When you get to Briterdan, however, you are hard pressed to find any yellow students. Carnevale and Rose have determined that just 3 percent of the students at colleges in Barron's top two tiers come from the bottom socioeconomic quartile, or families that generally earned less than $27,000 in 2006.
You also have trouble finding students who are working-class red, as just 7 percent of Briterdan's students are from that segment of society, characterized by family incomes roughly in the $27,000 to $51,000 range. Even green students, the ones from comfortably middle- to upper-middle-class families, are a lot less prevalent at Briterdan than outside its gates, accounting for just 16 percent of its undergraduates.
No doubt about it, Briterdan is a very blue place. The sons and daughters of the top fourth of society, those typically earning well over $83,000 annually, account for 74 percent of its students. They are more than four times as likely as those from the middle class, more than 10 times as likely as those from the working class, and nearly 25 times as likely as the poor to be enrolled here.
All told, the 146 top-two-tier colleges in the Carnevale and Rose study enrolled 170,000 freshmen. If such institutions were to adopt a policy of having student bodies that reflect society, their first-year enrollments from the less fortunate half would rise from 17,000 to 85,000, and more than 83,000 young people from wealthy families would have to go to college elsewhere.
Other research on college enrollments suggests that the wealthier the background, the greater the overrepresentation. A 2004 survey of freshmen at Northwestern University, for example, found that 20 percent came from families earning more than $250,000 annually. Fewer than 2 percent of the nation's families had incomes that high at the time.
Moreover, the wealthy have tightened their grip on most selective colleges in recent decades. A 1998 study of college freshmen found that of those from families earning more than $200,000 annually, 27.9 percent were enrolled at highly selective four-year colleges, up from 20.5 percent of freshmen from the same economic stratum in 1981. Such institutions continued to serve less than 5 percent of college freshmen from poor or working-class backgrounds. It is not the children of impoverished families whose numbers have shrunk as the ranks of the wealthy have grown. It is the children of the middle class who are being displaced.
Differences in academic preparation that are linked to class and race account for some of the skewing of college enrollments toward the wealthy, but hardly all of it. Even among those high school graduates with exceptionally high SAT scores, those from wealthy families are more than three times as likely to enroll in the most selective colleges as those whose parents are working class or poor.
Moreover, many of the selective colleges with low enrollments of students of modest means are institutions with vast resources to draw on for financial aid. The Chronicle of Higher Education looked at colleges that had $500 million or more in their endowments in the 2004–2005 academic year to see what share of their students were receiving federal Pell Grants, typically available to undergraduates from families earning $40,000 or less. Such students accounted for less than 15 percent of the undergraduate enrollment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and 42 of the 59 private colleges on the list. Among the colleges where they accounted for less than 10 percent were Notre Dame, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Virginia, and Washington University in St. Louis. A separate study of state flagship universities by the Education Trust found that from 1992 to 2003, the share of their enrollments that were on Pell Grants declined from 24 percent to 22 percent, even as the share of all American college students who were grant-eligible increased from 29 to 35 percent. The share of flagship university enrollments that is black, Hispanic, or Native American rose slightly, but not nearly as quickly as the share of the college-age population belonging to one of those minority groups. The overrepresentation of the children of privilege at flagship universities is not just an issue in prosperous states. Richard Bayer, dean of enrollment services at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, acknowledged at a January 2007 higher-education conference that the average family income of students enrolled at his institution is more than $100,000, even though the average Tennessee family's annual income is just over $40,000.
As much as some conservatives like to accuse them of being leftist indoctrination camps, most selective four-year colleges probably would impress Marx as bastions of the bourgeoisie. Not only are most of their students wealthy, but most of the people setting admissions policies and making admissions decisions are, at the very least, comfortably middle class.
Consider faculty members who frequently sit on admissions committees and, as a result of academe's revered tradition of shared governance, have a great deal of say over colleges' policies. In addition to being members of the nation's elite in terms of their own education and professional status—they have, after all, earned doctorates and landed much-sought-after jobs in academe—they also tend to have come from well-off and well-educated families. Among the studies documenting privilege among the professoriate is a 2001 survey of faculty members at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It found that the professors were three times as likely as Illinois residents or the rest of America to have had parents with master's or professional degrees, and were disproportionately likely to be the children of lawyers, civil engineers, and physicians, and people even farther up the social totem pole. Professors from humble backgrounds are a distinct minority, and many report feeling out of place.
Although many faculty members could be making more money doing something else, most full-time professors earn enough to wear something nicer than worn tweeds. According to the American Association of University Professors, as of the 2005–2006 academic year, the average full professor received an annual salary of $70,333, while those at private, independent, doctorate-granting universities made an average of $131,292. The AAUP survey does not count medical school professors, who are among the highest-paid members of academe, or the income that many faculty members derive from outside sources, such as consulting gigs or profits from the commercialization of their research.
Many college administrators make great money, especially those at the top. During the 2006–2007 academic year, the median income of presidents of public research universities exceeded $370,000. More than 100 public and private colleges paid their chief executives over $500,000.
Of course, being paid well does not preclude one from caring about the less fortunate. Many selective colleges have adopted admissions philosophies that espouse the goals of rewarding the hard working, socially committed, or academically successful, whoever they may be; or seeking out and nurturing talent; or promoting the best interests of society; or even assuming the role of the "great equalizer" by promoting social and economic mobility. But colleges cannot do any of these things if they don't have the money to stay in business and award financial aid. More than half of public college presidents and four-fifths of private college presidents say that their institution, when pulling its freshmen classes together, needs to make sure a large enough share is able to pay full tuition.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Color and Money by Peter Schmidt. Copyright © 2007 Peter Schmidt. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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