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

Affirmative Action for the Rich

You have a hard job, Mary Sue Coleman. You are president of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, which has been whipsawed lately by the rapidly changing legal environment of affirmative action. First came the U.S. Supreme Court’s twin rulings in the summer of 2003 over the legality of using race as an admissions boost at your law school and at the undergraduate college. While your undergraduate admissions program didn’t pass the court’s test – too much decisive weight was given to an applicant’s race -- you were thrilled by the Court’s separate ruling that the law school’s “narrowly tailored” program did pass constitutional muster. Indeed, the case appeared to settle the legitimacy of race-conscious university admissions for the foreseeable future. Claiming victory for the principle of diversity, you announced that the University of Michigan would modify its undergraduate admissions system in response to the Court’s demands.

But then, in November 2006 -- following similar initiatives in California and Washington State – Michigan voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 2, which called for banning the consideration of race or gender for admission to the state’s public universities. Initially, you balked, arguing that the highly selective Michigan couldn’t change admissions policies in midstream, and a federal judge did grant you a temporary reprieve from Prop 2 on Dec. 19. That lasted exactly ten days, when a U.S. Appeals Court reversed the judge’s order. You and your admissions staff were left with little choice but to immediately begin to make your undergraduate admissions system conform to the voters’ wishes.

Through it all, you have vowed to defend the principle of diversity in Ann Arbor classrooms. “We believe that in order to create a dynamic learning environment for all our students, we must bring together students who are highly qualified academically and who represent a wide range of backgrounds and experiences," you said in August 2003. "As a public university, we also have an important and distinctive role to provide access to students from all walks of life." (1)

Race-conscious admissions, you maintained, was necessary for the university to fulfill that role. But even when the law permitted you to consider race, did the university really done an adequate job of providing access to a broad cross-section of Michigan citizens? The university remains largely white (72 percent of undergraduates) and come from families that are far more affluent than the average Michigan family. (2)

Indeed, among top public research universities, the Ann Arbor campus ranked 28th in terms of enrolling lower-income students, as defined by their eligibility for federal Pell grants. Among the top thirty-one public universities, the university’s Pell grant enrollment rate of 13.5 percent in 2004 was higher only than that of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the University of Delaware and the University of Virginia. By the Pell measure, Michigan’s commitment to creating greater access to students of modest means put it on a par with many private universities – a dubious achievement for a public university with a claim to serve the public good. Consider, by comparison, your peers among public universities in terms of size, selectivity and research capabilities: the Pell grant enrollment rate at University of California at Los Angeles was 37.2 percent; at the University of Washington, a quarter of undergraduates qualified for the federal grants. (3)

As another example, how many federal TRIO programs does the Ann Arbor campus operate? Those are the programs such as Upward Bound, Talent Search, Student Support Services, and so on, which help students from lower-income families get to places like the University of Michigan and to survive the campus culture once there. According to a March 2004 report by Postsecondary Education Opportunity, the Ann Arbor campus has exactly zero TRIO programs, which places the University of Michigan among 24 universities that have no TRIO programs on campus. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor was the only public institution among that group of 24. (4)

That record is indicative of an institutional culture that seems downright hostile to the notion of economic diversity on your campus. Is it any wonder, then, that institutions such as the University of Washington and the University of California at San Diego, which put Michigan to shame on the economic diversity front, each have several active TRIO programs on their campuses?

Hence, there is ample room for improvement on the diversity front at the University of Michigan, and perhaps you could view the recent changes in the legal landscape an opportunity to create a far richer, more complete sort of diversity than you had previously thought possible.

I have no doubt that many higher education leaders, yourself included, understand that their class problem will eventually become America’s class problem as the nation struggles with holding together a bifurcated society split between haves and have-nots. This growing social and economic divide, increasingly a function of one’s access to higher education, has troubling implications for the nation’s democratic and economic future, and institutions like the University of Michigan must play a role in alleviating this divide. On a promising note, several elite institutions, including Harvard, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, MIT, Yale, Princeton and Brown in the last few years have created methods to ease the enormous debt burden that lower-income families face when sending children to college.

But these efforts will do little to address higher education’s real problem with class, and that is the prestige-driven higher education marketplace and how it severely restricts the numbers of lower-income students from the pool of credible candidates. Under their self-imposed imperative to identify, recruit and enroll the “right” students at almost any cost, colleges and universities, including the University of Michigan, are engaged in a hotly competitive arms race for educational prestige -- at least as defined by U.S. News and World Report and other self-appointed arbiters of college quality.
Freshmen SAT scores rule in the rankings game, and colleges have employed all manner of “enrollment management” tactics to identify and enroll the sorts of students that will boost their U.S. News profile. Invariably, the right students are the sons and daughters of the investment bankers, eye surgeons and university professors who have been groomed from birth to score well on the SAT.

Make no mistake, Dr. Coleman. While you no longer are permitted to engage in race-conscious affirmative action, you do employ affirmative action of another, more subtle and far more powerful variety. Michigan remains a prestige-driven university that has tuned its back on poor and working-class families by employing selection methods that systematically favor children born into privileged families.

Call it affirmative action for the rich.

It would be one thing if the meritocracy that you claim to defend could be defended. In truth, all the rhetoric that education leaders espouse about maintaining academic quality at a great university like Michigan, by holding the line on SAT I scores of incoming freshman, is hollow. Countless academic studies have demonstrated that, at least beyond a certain benchmark of adequate academic preparation, SAT I scores are a poor predictor of academic success in college. They remain, however, an exceedingly powerful correlate to the cultural, educational and economic capital a child receives from home and school. In order to create more diversity, major universities must do a better job with admissions tests, using them a lot more creatively, judiciously, and realistically.

In fact, an SAT score for the young daughter of a neurosurgeon growing up with every possible advantage attending all the best schools and receiving all the best test prep money can buy really does mean something different than the SAT score of a young girl growing up in a poor family in rural Montana whose parents never went to college. And yet, that poor Montana girl (her name, in fact, is Melissa Morrow, who I interviewed at length for my forthcoming book) might have a “special spark” that could lead to great accomplishments if she had a fighting chance to attend a university like Michigan. It’s up to you, Dr. Coleman, to give her that fighting chance.

One strategy is to use the SAT with more precision – and as a consequence with more humanity. For example, similar to the concept of taxable income on a tax return, an applicant’s SAT score could be adjusted to produce a “net” score with empirically defensible and objectively measurable factors that have been proven to correlate strongly with SAT performance. These factors could, for instance, include parental wealth, income and education levels, quality of schools attended, average SAT scores of one’s peers, neighborhood wealth, and so on. Many, if not all of such measures, can be part of a mechanical computation that would permit a relatively inexpensive way for the university to sort through thousands of applicants.

Once you know an applicant’s academic credentials in their full context, human judgment comes into play. Finding the “special spark” in a young person requires human judgment, and your faculty are your best and perhaps most under-employed asset in order to identify promising applicants. A truly comprehensive review of applicants requires that every college application be fully read by experienced evaluators, and the faculty can contribute productively to this enterprise. Some major universities, including the University of California system, have embarked on a full reading of all applications from eligible students with promising results. The point at which all applications receive a full and comprehensive review is up to the political and economic context at a particular university. Perhaps that point comes after adjusted SAT scores are calculated for applicants in order to create an eligibility pool of potential admits. But in order to give students like Melissa Morrow a fighting chance, that point at which the institution consider fully every application must come.

In the end, Dr. Coleman, whether Michigan is to become an institution that is truly open to students from diverse economic backgrounds is a matter of institutional culture. Beyond all the tactical methods for creating a new admissions system in response to the limits on affirmative action, the question is whether Michigan continues to choose a culture of elitism or creates a new culture. Such a culture should embody every aspect of the academic enterprise, from student support services to faculty attitudes toward unconventional students, that makes the university a welcoming place for all students.

It’s time, Dr. Coleman, to reach beyond academe’s self-satisfied notions of diversity. It’s time to pay a lot more attention to social class in your diversity equation.

Peter Sacks is the author of Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education, to be published in May 2007 by the University of California Press. His book, Standardized Minds: The High Price of America’s Testing Culture and What We can do to Change it, was published in 2000 by Perseus.

Notes

(1) “New U-M undergraduate admissions process to involve more information, individual review,” Aug. 28, 2003 http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/print.php?Releases/2003/Aug03/admissions
(2) This statement is based, admittedly, on incomplete data. For this article, I contacted the University of Michigan for information about the socioeconomic backgrounds of admitted students, and I received no reply.
(3) Karin Fischer, “Elite Colleges Lag in Serving the Needy,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12, 2006.
(4) “Pell Grant Share of Undergraduates Enrollment at the 50 Best National Universities 1992-93 and 2001-02,” Postsecondary Education OPPORTUNITY Issue #141 – March 2004