"The problem is not that poor but qualified candidates go undiscovered, but that there are simply very few of these candidates in the first place." The role of selective universities in promoting social mobility, Bowen and Bok declared, was limited mostly to admitting more middle-class children to elite institutions: "It usually requires more than a single generation to move up to the highest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder."
That was then, this is now. Today, the current president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, has essentially repudiated Bok's position and devised an innovative program to reach out to, admit, and pay the tuitions of qualified, low-income students. Summers calls the growing divide between the children of the rich and the children of the poor "the most serious domestic problem in the United States today." Bowen, the president of the Mellon Foundation, has followed suit, teaming up with colleagues Martin Kurzweil and Eugene Tobin to write a book advocating preferential treatment of poor applicants.
Despite its uninspired title, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education provides a fascinating look into how the admissions process at selective universities helps certain groups and not others. Mellon assembled a new data set of 180,000 students who applied to be in the 1995 freshman class at 19 selective colleges (five Ivies--Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania; 10 private liberal arts colleges; and four top public universities).
While the under-representation of low-income students should come as no surprise, the details the authors amass to depict its extent can be shocking. Only 11 percent of students at the top-tier universities come from families in the bottom income quartile (compared with 50 percent from the top income quartile). Only 3 percent of students are both from the bottom income quartile and the first generation to attend college. These numbers track roughly with Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose's research for The Century Foundation which found that at the most selective 146 colleges, 3 percent of students come from the bottom socio-economic quartile and 74 percent from the richest.
The book essentially shreds the assertions of selective colleges that they have long provided a leg up in admissions to hard-working low-income students. For example, in defending the University of Michigan's affirmative-action policy in the Supreme Court, eight selective universities (including four of the five Ivy League colleges in Bowen, Kurzweil, and Tobin's study) claimed to give "significant favorable consideration" to students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
In fact, the study found that, at the 19 universities surveyed, a significant edge is given to recruited athletes, legacies, and underrepresented minorities, but not to low-income students. Within a given SAT range, being a recruited athlete increases the chance of admissions by 30 percentage points (that is, for example, from a 20 percent chance to a 50 percent chance). Being an underrepresented minority boosts one's chance of admission by 28 percentage points and being a legacy by 20 percentage points. By contrast, poor kids receive "essentially no break in the admissions process; they fare neither better nor worse than other applicants." Whereas a college that was race-blind in admissions would be considered reactionary today, selective universities are absolutely blind to need, raising the question, the authors say, of "whether being need-blind is good enough."
Given the stark portrait of a university system seemingly uninterested in the ideal of social mobility, Bowen's suggestion that selective universities assign low-income students a preference in admissions akin to a legacy boost seems rather modest. Doing so would raise the percentage of students from low-income families from 11 percent to 17 percent without compromising academic quality. But why stop at the 20-percent legacy preference? Why don't the poor deserve the boost given to minorities or athletes? The authors don't provide a very convincing argument. "The idea of a 'legacy thumb' appeals to us in part because there is a nice kind of symbolic symmetry associated with it," they say, in which a deserved preference for those who have overcome obstacles balances out an undeserved preference for the wealthy. For all the appeal of symmetry, Bowen's proposal in this regard is unpersuasive. If anything, an honest attempt to make universities a more effective engine of class mobility would require giving the poor a significantly greater edge than the privileged.
