Inside Higher Ed has a piece on new education research that suggests that competitive universities are still overwhelmingly inaccessible to students from the lowest economic quartile. The researchers provide policy proposals that would ameliorate this inequity, which include implementing more of an income-based system of affirmative action and improving the quality of community colleges:
Taken together, the researchers argue that the cumulative effects on SAT scores for students from highly economically disadvantaged backgrounds are huge — hundreds of points, in many cases, enough to make them unlikely to be successful in selective college admissions processes that often lean heavily on standardized scores. Instituting a system of socioeconomic-based affirmative action that took such disadvantage into account (on top of race- and ethnicity-based preferences, which they conclude are still necessary) could certainly begin to erase the class stratification in higher education.
But given the tendency of colleges to pursue status (often defined by high test scores, etc.), and the desire of parents to get their children into the selective institutions, trying to use that sort of affirmative action would be a “bit like spitting in the wind against that tide,” Carnevale said. “It would be a huge undertaking, and probably unimaginable,” to change institutional behavior in that way.
So “if you can’t move low-income and minority kids en masse into the high-quality systems” of colleges, Carnevale said, the likelier alternative to improving the lot of students ill-served by higher education is to strengthen the quality of the institutions they do attend — “two-year schools and lower-end four-year colleges.” The Obama administration (which Carnevale has advised in both formal and informal ways) took steps in this direction with its proposed American Graduation Initiative, which would have poured $10 billion into community colleges, but had to be scaled back significantly.
The first proposal is likely to get some support from conservatives, since basing affirmative action heavily on income is a “concession” that I think most conservatives are likely to give in the affirmative action debate. But I think the second proposal– strengthening the quality of two-year colleges– is much more worthwhile for a couple of reasons. First, even if this initiative is ultimately unsuccessful in mitigating the effects of socioeconomic stratification on college admissions, better community colleges will produce many positive externalities for the American workforce. How could we as a country be worse off if more people are receiving better vocational training and associates degrees in important career-related disciplines?
I also tend to favor the second proposal because I disagree with the premise of the researchers’ argument about educational inequity, which goes something like this: poor students are many times more unlikely than students from wealthy backgrounds to get into competitive universities, and the student bodies of these competitive schools do not have enough socioeconomic diversity, so we should implement policies that get more economically-disadvantaged students into competitive institutions. The main premise here is that it is an inherently good thing for students from the bottom economic quartile to be well represented in competitive universities. I don’t disagree with this premise, but I do think that we should simultaneously consider questions/issues like: 1) How well are poor students performing at competitive universities, and what can be done to improve their performance? 2) What are the economic returns to education for economically underprivileged students, and are they different from the income returns of students who come from wealthier backgrounds? If so, what can be done to eliminate these differences? 3) Is attending a competitive university the best way for a student from a poor background to move up the socioeconomic ladder? If students gain admission to competitive schools through an improved community college system, I believe they are less likely to encounter problems with #1 and #2 and are also more likely to benefit from getting their university degree.
