The Ivy League-ed Few

How the American College System Keeps Out the Smart, Poor Kid

At Gettysburg College, as of this year, 22% of the first-year class received pell grants. Pell grants are essentially federal subsidies for college students, and they are usually received by those who fall in the lowest 40% of America in terms of income distribution.

This is, I admit, an extremely high number for an East Coast, private liberal arts college, and a genuine improvement over even a couple years ago, when only 14% of the first-year cohort received pell grants. However, this does not hold true for most liberal arts colleges across the country, especially not for most of those 140ish colleges that have more than $500 million in endowment.

According to an article from the New York Times’s The Upshot from January 2017, which was primarily taken from a study conducted by Opportunity Insights at Harvard University, 38 colleges had more students from the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent, including 5 Ivy Leagues.

Furthermore, the article reads, “About four in 10 students from the top 0.1 percent attend an Ivy League or elite university, roughly equivalent to the share of students from poor families who attend any two- or four-year college.”

This is, simply-put, a problem. To accept that 4 in 10 students from the top 0.1 percent attend an Ivy League or elite university as a natural truth that is just and fair, or merely to fail to question such a fact and accept it, is to say that those who are most qualified for the top American colleges and universities inescapably and inevitably belong to the top echelon of American wealth. At the very least, such a mentality assumes that there are more qualified wealthy than poor, and that, regardless of extenuating circumstances, higher-income students are far more prepared for the trials and academic rigour of the college — especially the liberal arts college — experience than lower-income students are.

First, there are low-income smart kids who are well-suited and qualified for the challenges of university — a lot, in fact.

Malcolm Gladwell, in an episode of his podcast Revisionist History entitled “Carlos Doesn’t Remember,” said, “Actually, there are a huge number of poor, smart kids in the United States. There’s probably 35,000 students a year who score in the 90th percent or above on their SATs and who also come from families living on less than $40,000 a year. Now, keep in mind these are kids who don’t have tutors, who don’t go to high schools with a million Advanced Placement courses, and who probably took the test once, not two or three times like upper middle-class kids. So these scores are on the low side, these are kids who could ace a test in one shot.”

Second, when those smart, poor kids do get into Ivy League and elite schools, they succeed just as much as the rich students do.

In an NPR interview from 2014, Stanford University economics professor Caroline Hoxby said, “…the low-income high achievers who do go to selective colleges and universities, not only do they do well there, they do just as well as the high-income students with the same incoming test scores and grades.”

However, there remains a disconnect between elite colleges and low-income high achieving students. This may not entirely be the fault of the institutions of higher education, as elite colleges and universities have put a lot of effort into finding these students and getting them to their campuses.

Earlier in that same NPR interview, Hoxby said: “…the reason was not that the institutions were making little effort to recruit them. The institutions are making enormous effort to recruit them. But the institutions are having trouble finding the students because most of the low-income high achievers in the United States are actually quite dispersed. That means they’re one of the only really high achievers in their high school.”

The reasons for low-income high achieving students being fewer and farther between compared to high-income high achieving students goes much deeper. In short, inequality and poverty are anathema to academic success; as income decreases, obstacles — academic, personal, familial, obviously fiscal, and otherwise — multiply, and leave little time for concentrated study — for homework and school, let alone preparation for the SAT or ACT or composition of college application essays.

The reality, as Hoxby, again, and Christopher Avery, a Harvard professor of public policy, found in their study “The Missing ‘One-Offs,’” was that “a large number — probably the vast majority — of very high-achieving students from low-income families do not apply to a selective college or university.”

They found that the smartest, most brilliant poor do not even apply to selective colleges. Don Fraser, Jr., the founder and director of CollegeSnapps, “an organization that tries to introduce students of limited means to a wider selection of college choices,” said on that same NPR segment with Caroline Hoxby that the reason was that “the students themselves, they’re not aware of these colleges.”

In other words, most of the smart, poor kids in the United States don’t know that these opportunities exist. Additionally, the application process is overwhelming and time-consuming, and many of those smart, poor kids may be naturally intimidated by such an exhausting undertaking. Furthermore, without the support structure that invariably accompanies financial security, the application process may simply be outside of the means of many low-income individuals.

Fraser said, “…actually submitting an application isn’t an easy process. So completing all the steps that you need to do in order to actually apply to a competitive college, even if you know that you can get into that college or you’re — you know, you’ve been given all the resources, and now you have to — but you have all these different pieces of the puzzle that need to be completed. I have to get my letters of recommendation. I have to get my essay done. I have to do a résumé. I have to — you know, there’s many moving parts. […] And a lot of the students do get tripped up here.”

This matters — economically and morally. Economically, as Hoxby said, “…the earnings difference for a low-income student who attends a nonselective college or university… versus going to one of the most selective colleges in the United States where all of these students can get in given their scores, is a huge earnings difference over their lifetime. It’s an earnings difference at a minimum of about 20 percent every year.”

Morally, the smart, rich kid must get into Harvard. We consider — or, at least, we must consider — our higher education system as a rigorous program for the most academic of American society; an opportunity for the brightest to challenge themselves, to the benefit of all. In a phrase, America relies on the meritocracy of higher education for its most devastating, wondrous, beautiful, and thought-provoking accomplishments. That is why it matters: it is an error in the programming of our national academic psyche if some are allowed such monumental opportunities as are offered by the highly-selective institutions of our nation simply because their parents had more money than a more qualified, less wealthy candidate.

But first, the smart, poor kid must apply to Harvard, and I think there are ways we can accommodate that. The first solution is the most difficult, the most effective, the least likely, and the longest-term: it is to take dramatic and effective action to reduce wealth inequality. On the most basic level, wealth-inequality is the root of all the issues in regards to inequality in access to higher education in the United States: there can be no systematic, cultural, or quality of life disparity without the differentiation that wealth and income mandate. A perfect meritocracy would value academic faculty above all else, and hold all else constant, ceteris paribus. But academic faculty can only be examined and measured correctly in the context of the life that it endured, and thus income, wealth, and even race, as it, too, has a significant impact on quality of life in the United States, must be appreciated in the evaluation of an individual’s ability to succeed in college.

The issue with such an attack on inequality as a solution to unequal access to higher education is, unfortunately, its political infeasibility and its lack of immediate effect. The second solution involves a wide variety of reforms to the application process, a major component being an evaluation of college-entry exams like the SAT and ACT.

One problem with the SAT and ACT is the continued allowance of retakes, which gives the wealthy the ability to retake the exam as many times as they want on their own dime, significantly improving their scores with each iteration. On an even more basic level, higher-income students have greater access to tutors and study materials than low-income students.

This manifests itself in the average scores that different income brackets receive, as a 2014 article from the Washington Post outlines: “Students from families earning more than $200,000 a year average a combined score of 1,714, while students from families earning under $20,000 a year average a combined score of 1,326.”

Setting aside the application process, the deck remains stacked against the smart, poor kid who applies to Harvard. Despite Ivy League and elite universities expanding their financial aid programs and reaching out to lower-income students to encourage them to apply to their institutions, it is not easier now for lower-income students to get in to these schools.

In fact, according to the study from Opportunity Insights in 2017, “The representation of low-income students at high-mobility colleges has fallen since 2000.”

That same study made another startling discovery: “Children with parents in the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an elite colleges and universities than children with parents in the bottom 20% of the income distribution.”

Another obstacle for the smart, poor kid is legacy, the preference in admissions to those prospective students who have had family attend a given institution. This has nothing to do with merit, and I find little to tolerate its continuation. That a student has a relative who attended a given college is completely irrelevant to the academic faculty of the student, and to continue the practice of legacy admissions while arguing vehemently that the process is the purest form of meritocracy in the world is to make a mockery of the concept of meritocracy.

Regardless, the practice is still widely used today, as stated in an article in Inside Higher Education: “Forty-two percent of admissions directors at private colleges and universities said that legacy status is a factor in admissions decisions at their institutions. The figure at public institutions is only 6 percent.”

Legacy admissions still play a huge role in a candidates application, as revealed in the preference that higher education institutions — particularly the Ivy Leagues — show for legacy candidates over the rest.

An NPR article from 2018 reads, “An analysis commissioned by Students For Fair Admissions found legacy applicants were accepted at a rate of nearly 34 percent from 2009 to 2015. According to the report, that’s more than five times higher than the rate for non-legacies over the same six-year period: just 5.9 percent.”

Ending legacy admissions is another critical step in equalizing the academic playing field.

One final option I would like to point out is outlined in an article published in The Atlantic by Adam Harris in March of this year: “How can colleges fix this crisis? The simplest way would likely be for selective institutions to stop being so selective and enroll more students. Instead of carefully crafting admitted classes… institutions could open their doors and serve more students… Selective institutions would undoubtedly take a “prestige hit” because of that, but it could alter the way parents think about college: not as social capital to be bought, but as an opportunity for learning and growth.”

I think this reveals a really different perspective on higher education than we’re used to. Unlike the current college system, this vision is built much more on bettering the average college than bettering the already fantastic college. This is achieved in a way that gives those who have far less opportunity than they deserve their rightful spot in the American collegiate symposium.

What is the purpose of the American system of higher education? And is it working? I believe that we have put much stock in the brilliance of a chosen few — the rich, the white, the privileged. And have allowed them to develop into an elite. I mean elite not in an entirely negative sense, but in terms of exclusivity and supremacy of capital — in this case, fiscal, yes, but also, and more importantly, academic.

But the country is changing — it has been for hundreds of years. It is changing in its demographics, as the racial makeup of the nation rapidly changes and income inequality recategorizes the American population, and, subsequently, in its culture and values. And it is in the nation’s interest to see that as constantly as possible reflected in the Ivy League-ed few.

Perhaps we do have a revision in order — or we must make one. Why not open the doors of higher education to more? Society will benefit most — fiscally, of course, but more importantly culturally and academically — when more can share in the prosperity of wisdom; when more can understand their country and their world more comprehensively; and when more can provide an improved future for their children, who will, in their turn, have a better chance to capitalize on their scholastic potential.