The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us

by Paul Tough

Upward mobility is not simply a question of earning more money than one’s parents. It is also, for many people, a process of cultural disruption: leaving behind one set of values and assumptions and plunging into a new and foreign one. It can be disorienting and emotionally wrenching, shattering family ties and challenging deeply held notions of identity and purpose.

And there is always someone. Whether that sideline conversation is taking place in Scarsdale or Winnetka or Mill Valley, there is inevitably, in an office park not too far away, a test-prep magician, a teen whisperer, a tutor with a reputation for raising scores on the SAT or the ACT by eye-popping margins. His rates are astronomical, of course, and his schedule is always full. But if you can get in, and if you can afford him, he’s the guy you want.

The College Board, which was founded in 1900 by a group of elite eastern prep schools and colleges, is an unusual organization.

As the journalist Nicholas Lemann recounts in his book The Big Test, the SAT was created and cultivated, in the 1920s and 1930s, in the confines of the Ivy League, championed by the president of Harvard and administered by a team at Princeton. Its inventors had no interest

in expanding the college-going population nationally; instead, their goal was to identify and locate a small number of especially bright middle-class students around the country who might be added to the existing student bodies at Ivy League universities, which at the time were populated mostly by wealthy young prep-school grads who cared more about attending debutante balls than university classes.

(The College Board’s public relations machinations seem mostly to have been an attempt to distract attention from the fact that the SAT and the ACT were the instruments that helped to enable this concentration of privilege.)

The colleges were gaming their numbers, deliberately selecting the highest-income students they could find whose admission would still allow them to claim an impressive Pell percentage. On average, an applicant just below the Pell cutoff was ten times more likely to be admitted and enrolled at these celebrated colleges than a student just above the line.

And that same racial breakdown, they said, was evident at Harvard as a whole. As the New York Times reported the following June, Gates and Guinier said that “only about a third” of Harvard’s black students “were from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves.”

“It’s just too much of a coincidence,” Harper said in his NACAC speech. “You mean to tell me that the exact same number of black folks applied to Dartmouth and to Stanford and to MIT and to Yale and to Princeton, and they all landed at the same place in terms of their enrollment? It just seems to me that there has been some determination about how many black students are worthy of admission to these institutions. It’s just too similar.”

About 15 percent of American high school graduates are black, according to the federal education department. But Princeton’s student body is 8 percent black. Cornell’s is 8 percent black. Brown’s is 8 percent black. Yale’s is 8 percent black. Harvard’s is 8 percent black. The pattern is hard to miss.

these low-income black students had spent their entire high school careers in that world, many of them at prestigious boarding schools on generous financial aid. And those four years had been long enough for them to make friends whose families had ski chalets and beach houses, long enough to take part in the subsidized study-abroad programs that many exclusive private schools offer their students, long enough to infiltrate the culture of the American elite.

The first is that the Privileged Poor are vastly overrepresented at Ivy League and similarly selective colleges. Just

Those programs are small—Prep for Prep sends about 120 students a year to private schools; the TEAK Fellowship sends about 25. But that little sliver of the black population, Jack discovered, produces about half of the low-income black students at Ivy League colleges.

The second big conclusion Tony Jack reached in his research was that Doubly Disadvantaged students had a much rockier experience once they got to college than Privileged Poor students did. And the most stressful part of the transition wasn’t the academic work (though that was often stressful as well). It was their daily interactions with their fellow students.

Indoctrination into cultural norms is part of the accepted curriculum in private school. It’s part of what parents are paying for.

The Doubly Disadvantaged students Jack interviewed recoiled from this whole idea. For them, Jack wrote, “college is supposed to be about attending lectures, completing assignments, and studying for tests”—what they collectively called “the work.” “Trying to figure out when, how, and even why personal connections are needed can paralyze them.”

At each stage of the process, Rivera wrote, the employers she studied used criteria to sort and evaluate candidates “that are highly correlated with parental income and education. Taken together, these seemingly economically neutral decisions result in a hiring process that filters students based on their parents’ socioeconomic status.”

The philosophy behind this sorting system is that the admissions offices at elite colleges know what they’re doing. If you graduate from a top-tier university, that means you were admitted to a top-tier university. And according to the recruiters Rivera interviewed, that admission offer, even though it came when you were just a teenager, signaled a lot: that you’re smart, that you learn quickly, that you can handle hard work. How well you did at college and what you learned there is largely irrelevant, the recruiters explained. What matters is that you got in.

Instead, they preferred candidates who played sports with a high barrier to entry, either because of specialized equipment or expensive club fees or both—sports like lacrosse, field hockey, tennis, squash, and rowing.

This created a system that was apparently open and meritocratic but that actually strongly favored young people from high socioeconomic backgrounds and eliminated the rest from consideration. “If you’re not playing the right sport when you’re fourteen years old, it’s going to be really, really hard to get a job at Goldman Sachs after college,” Rivera explained.

According to Moody’s Investors Service, a quarter of private American colleges in 2018 were operating in the red, spending more than they were taking in, and there were hundreds more that were barely getting by. So if you’re in a job like Boeckenstedt’s, sitting in the admissions office, sorting through applications from prospective freshmen, you don’t have the luxury, these days, of making your decisions based solely on abstract notions of merit and excellence and fairness and equity. What you’re looking for—to put it bluntly—is customers, ideally ones who will pay large amounts of money for the service you are offering.

That phenomenon is due, in large part, to the power of the “America’s Best Colleges” list produced each year by the editors of U.S. News & World Report. The list rewards colleges for admitting students with high SAT scores, and it also rewards them for having a low “acceptance rate”—the percentage of the applicant pool that is admitted. The

The U.S. News list is openly loathed by admissions folks; in a 2010 poll, only 3 percent of NACAC members said they thought the “America’s Best Colleges” list accurately reflected the actual best colleges in America, and 87 percent said the list forced universities to take steps that were “counterproductive” to their educational mission in order to improve their ranking.

Because most high school seniors employ the Hoxby principle when they’re making their college decisions (Choose the most selective school that will admit you), you’re inevitably going to lose a lot of the most appealing students you admit.

“merit aid,” and they found it worked remarkably well. It turned out that giving grants—even relatively small ones—to students with high family incomes made it significantly more likely that those students would enroll in your college. (If you called the grant a “scholarship,” it worked even better.) And if a high-scoring student was willing to pay, say, $30,000 of your $40,000 tuition, that was still a pretty good deal for your college.

minute backdoor admissions process called the “Z-list.” Harvard seems to use the Z-list—which comes with a requirement that admitted students take a gap year before enrolling—as a quiet way to admit legacies and children of wealthy donors with lower grades and test scores.

It is entirely possible, in fact, that this is the reason that the thirty thousand packets the College Board mailed out each year to high-achieving low-income students didn’t make much of an impact on the kind of colleges those students attended. Maybe it wasn’t so much that the students who received the packets were reluctant to apply to prestigious colleges. Maybe those colleges were reluctant to admit them—and when they did admit those students, maybe they didn’t give them enough financial aid to make it feasible for them to attend.

“If colleges and universities are serious about enrolling more first-generation students, low-income students, or students of color,” he wrote, “they need to take a serious look at the weight of tests in the admissions process.”