A Dirty Little Secret

The flagship campus at the University of Wisconsin in Madison has a dirty little secret.

For all the grand rhetoric that higher education leaders have given to the importance of diversity in recent years, UW-Madison and many of our best public universities have instead become bastions of elitism, creating admissions and financial aid policies that are especially harmful to lower-income students and especially beneficial to students from affluent backgrounds.

In essence, if you have parents who never went to college or are from a family of limited financial means and attended schools on the wrong side of town, your chance of gaining admission to a university like Wisconsin is slim at best.

And that’s just top public universities. As for private institutions, such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Williams – opportunities for students of modest economic backgrounds are even more limited.

Universities are increasingly driven by the demands of the higher education marketplace. They compete with their peers for prestige in a cutthroat competition for the “right” sorts of students – those of high class rank and superb SAT scores -- who will make universities look good in the U.S. News & World Report beauty contest.

When it comes to “diversity,” universities talk the talk of Martin Luther King Jr., but they walk the walk profit-maximizing corporations. No, universities don’t earn profits per se. But they do maximize earnings – in their case, institutional endowments. Endowments are driven by the ability of these institutions to compete in the market for institutional prestige.

Scholarships for needy students? That’s so last century. Of course, if you happen to be poor and score off the charts on the SAT, you’ll get admitted to virtually any top college, and receive generous financial support should you enroll. But that’s a rarity. Because of the inexorable correlation between family wealth, parent education levels and student SAT scores, the pool of brilliant poor students (as measured by test scores) is limited indeed.

Such students are decidedly not the target market for endowment-maximizing universities.

In order to persuade the right students to apply and enroll, those from the affluent suburbs of Chicago, Detroit and Milwaukee, universities are increasingly fond of merit scholarships and other enticements. The dirty little secret is that the lion’s share of these “merit” scholarships go to the very affluent students who don’t really need the money for college.

To be sure, race-conscious affirmative action has been the principle tool for universities to create more diversity on their campuses, which is all well and good. But in terms of achieving a semblance of socioeconomic diversity, many of our best public universities have little to be proud of. Unfortunately, affirmative action as we’ve known it has done little to open such universities to students from families of low and modest economic backgrounds.

Consider the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Among the top 31 public universities in terms of institutional endowment, a mere 13 percent of Wisconsin’s undergraduates were eligible for the federal Pell grant for lower-income students in the Fall of 2004. Only the University of Delaware and the University of Virginia, at 9.8 percent and 7.6 percent, respectively, had worse records of enrolling lower-income students. (1)

Fortunately, higher education leaders are waking up, realizing that they are failing in their responsibility to serve the public good, not simply their private institutional interests. Among them is the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In fact, the university wants to revise its admissions system, adopting the ‘comprehensive review” method of evaluating applicants that allows the admissions office to consider one’s academic achievement in the context of his or her social and economic background. The new system will consider race but not just race. The university hopes that such a system will permit it to achieve a far richer level of diversity than in the past.

“Diversity isn’t just race,” university Regent David Walsh said. “It’s geography. It’s handicapped. It’s the veterans. It’s the football player. They all bring something to this campus. It’s about having a better educational experience for our students.” (2)

But there is dissention in the ranks of conservatives who believe academic merit is some absolutely measurable quantity, reducible to grades and test scores, and that students should, in essence, be rank-ordered for admission according to academic criteria alone.

According to Inside Higher Ed, Stephen Nass, a Republican who chairs the Wisconsin State Assembly’s committee on colleges and universities, believes the UW regents “are sending the wrong message to high-achieving high school students who might be turned away from the most competitive schools because of the policy.”

In other words, according to Nass, the university would sacrifice academic excellence on the altar of diversity. (3)

We’ve heard these dire warnings before.

This notion that our great universities are on the brink of collapse, threatened by ill-conceived efforts to put test scores in their proper perspective in admissions, has been proven over and over to be hollow rhetoric. We heard it in Texas with the Top 10 Percent Plan. We heard it at the University of California with the introduction of its comprehensive review admissions system.

We keep hearing these dire warnings, and yet the empirical evidence continues to demonstrate that universities can do a better job of predicting academic success by considering a full range of factors -- from family socioeconomic background to scores and grades -- that paint a true picture of a young person's academic promise. If I were an admissions officer looking for our nation's next leaders, I'd take an impoverished young girl growing up in rural Montana with modest test scores but doing real science any day of the week over the privileged child of a neurosurgeon with perfect test scores.

Money and institutional prestige are the coin of the realm in the American “meritocracy.” We can only imagine what it might look like if genuine merit were the underlying principle.


1. Karin Fischer, “Elite Colleges Lag in Serving the Needy,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12, 2006.
2. University of Wisconsin, Madison, “Regents approve admissions policy, Feb. 9, 2007. http://www.wisconsin.edu/news/2007/r070209a.htm
3. Elia Powers, “Considering Race in Admissions,” Inside Higher Ed, Feb. 12, 2007. http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/12/wisconsin