The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us

by Paul Tough

Shannen had applied to two Ivy League colleges: Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania. She wanted to get into Princeton, but she really, really wanted to get into the University of Pennsylvania. It had been her “dream school,” she told me, since seventh grade. And in less than an hour, either her dream would come true, or it wouldn’t.

There were fights in the hallway every day, and she was bullied by new arrivals from the Dominican Republic who made fun of her for not being Dominican enough. Shannen was proud of her roots and her race, but there were elements of other cultures she was coming to appreciate as well: Coldplay, pasta, Harry Potter novels. She retreated into her schoolwork, studying harder, doing more. And when she got to high school, she worked harder still.

In the first semester of her freshman year, Shannen’s name appeared at the very top of the list, and her name had stayed at the top ever since.

She drank so much coffee that she became immune to its effects.

Where it was all leading, in Shannen’s mind, was college. And not just any college. When she was little, teachers and family members saw her intelligence and intense determination and predicted that she would make it into an Ivy League school.

In the spring of junior year, she was accepted into a highly selective and demanding college-prep summer program for low-income students called Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America; historically, more than half of each year’s LEDA class was admitted to an Ivy League college.

Suddenly the idea that she might aspire to a place like Penn or Princeton didn’t seem crazy at all.

She visualized herself walking in the door of her family’s small apartment uptown and telling her mother that she had been accepted to Penn. She could picture her mother’s exact expression. She could almost see the tears of happiness.

And then she pictured herself walking in and having to tell her mom that she had been rejected. The tears of disappointment. And then tomorrow, having to go into school and break the news to her teachers and friends, everyone who had been counting on her to succeed. Hearing “Oh, I’m so sorry,” over and over. The pats on the back and the sympathetic hugs, all day long. It was unbearable even to imagine.

who were trying to make sense, as I was, of the changing landscape of American higher education.

It was Penn she kept thinking about as we sat there, not Princeton. She liked that Penn was urban and not too far from home. She had visited Penn’s campus the previous summer with her LEDA group, and everything about the place had seemed perfect.

She bought a sweater with the Penn logo, which she loved wearing. She had spent forever writing her Penn application essay, trying to get it just right. Her dream was to double-major in paleontology and business, taking classes in the archaeology department and at the Wharton School.

Her best friend from LEDA, a girl from Tennessee named Tess, was applying to Penn as well, and they had already agreed that if they ...

Shannen could picture them there in the Penn admissions department, paging through her application—her grades and her test scores and her essay and her recommendation letters—and rendering a judgment on who they thought she really was.

That you chose to put yourself through.” Now she was crying harder. “And I did choose it. I love school. I love what I do. It’s something that I don’t force myself to do. I come to school because it’s me. It’s just who I am.”

All I could make out were the words “sincerely regret,” but that was enough. Princeton was next, and it was more bad news: she was wait-listed, and she knew almost no one gets off the wait list at Princeton.

There was also the mitigating fact that, two weeks earlier, Shannen had been admitted to Davidson, a very good liberal arts college near Charlotte, North Carolina, which had offered her an amazingly generous financial-aid package. The list price to attend Davidson for four years was about $260,000, but Shannen, if she went, would pay a total of twelve dollars.

campus for a visit, and she’d liked it a lot. She’d be fine there, she knew. But Davidson was a long way from her mom. And it didn’t offer courses in paleontology. And it wasn’t her dream school. It wasn’t what everyone was expecting.

That was what made this moment so hard for Shannen. It wasn’t just the practical fact of where she would be spending the next four years of her life.

“They think I’m an essay,” she said. “They think I’m a test score.”

Her enthusiasms were as infectious as they were idiosyncratic: the novels of David Foster Wallace, the latest theory on dinosaur extinction, the Black Lives Matter movement.

place of prestige and culture and privilege and learning.

Economists and sociologists have a name for the process of finding a new place in society, this phenomenon Shannen was dreaming of: social mobility.

Upward mobility is not simply a question of earning more money than one’s parents.

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 how do they feel when they succeed?

mobility in the United States today depends, in large part, on what happens to individuals during a relatively brief period in late adolescence and early adulthood.

If you are a young American like Shannen Torres, the decisions you make about higher education—and the decisions that are made for you—play a critical role in determining the course of the rest of your life.

work or the military or college; a two-year or a four-year school; stay in the city or go to school upstate?

Tocqueville found much to admire in the United States, but he was puzzled by Americans’ embrace of the idea that social class should be fluid.

one in which class mobility became tightly linked not with entrepreneurship but with educational attainment.

And for young Americans in Shannen’s generation, the national statistics were now painting a darker picture, one in which a college degree was no longer just a tool for upward mobility; it had also become a shield against downward mobility.

Young adults who didn’t have a college degree were almost four times as likely to be living in poverty as those who did. The unemployment rate for Americans with only a high school degree was double the rate for Americans with a bachelor’s degree.

and they were more than twice as likely to divorce or separate if they did marry.

awarded annually to the best young economist in the country, and most likely the only reason he doesn’t yet have a Nobel Prize in Economics is that he’s only forty, and the prize has never been given to anyone younger than fifty.

Chetty is a leading figure in a relatively new movement in economic research known as big data, in which increasingly powerful computers employ nimble analytical tools to carve up massive amounts of information.

The IRS data has allowed Chetty to illuminate in new ways how an American’s opportunities for mobility are affected by the neighborhood she grew up in and by the color of her skin—and, perhaps most centrally, by whether and where she goes to college.

First, using the IRS data, Chetty and his team found that students who attend ultraselective colleges in the United States are much more likely than other students to become very rich as adults.

Young people who attend “Ivy Plus” institutions—meaning the Ivy League colleges plus a handful of other institutions with similarly elevated selectivity rates, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, and Stanford—have about a one in five chance of landing, in their midthirties, among the top 1 percent of American earners, with incomes over $630,000.

People who attend “other elite” four-year colleges (including Davidson) have about a one in eleven chance of hitting the top 1 percent. Students at community colleges, meanwhile, have about a one in three hundred chance. (Students who don...

Attending the same college eliminates almost all the advantages that those who grow up with family wealth have over those who grow up in poverty.

almost entirely populated by the students who benefit the least from the education they receive there: the ones who were already wealthy when they arrived on campus.

And two of the colleges where the tilt was most extreme were Princeton and Penn, the two colleges that rejected Shannen Torres.

And besides, Stanford was the longest of long shots, arguably the single hardest college in the country to get into.

No one is rejected by Penn and admitted to Stanford. It just doesn’t happen. Except sometimes it does.

Instead, there was a “Congratulations!” And an “Everyone who reviewed your application was inspired.” And a “You are, quite simply, a fantastic match with Stanford.”

The room spun. Shannen screamed. Her mom came running. More screaming.

But at the same time, getting into Stanford after being rejected by Penn made the whole application and admissions process, which Shannen had taken at face value for so long, seem suddenly random and capricious and even a little ridiculous.

The next fall, Shannen would go off to Stanford and study science and business and politics and take advantage of the many amazing opportunities that went along with the experience of being an undergraduate at an institution of unparalleled privilege and power.

She might even get rich, like so many of her classmates. But she would never entirely get back the heartfelt, optimistic faith in the American system of higher education that had kept her working so hard for so long.