The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us

by Paul Tough

My work on this book began in much the same way. I had heard about a series of novel interventions that were designed to improve the fortunes of disadvantaged teenagers by subtly shifting their behavior​—encouraging them to apply to more prestigious universities, to study harder for the SAT, to resist the temptation to drop out of college when the going got tough. These interventions all proceeded from the same premise: that uninformed students were making foolish errors that were undermining their college prospects. According to this way of thinking, the higher education system was eager to embrace these students and help them succeed, but the students weren’t taking advantage of the opportunities they were being offered.

eventually became clear to me that the greatest obstacles low-income Americans face as they make their way to and through college are not psychological or cultural. They are economic and structural.

How could such well-meaning people be overseeing a system that produced such vast inequities?

Between 1980 and 2015, states reduced their fiscal support for public higher education in the United States almost by half, relative to personal income.

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.

The relative chaos of the American class system was disorienting to Tocqueville. If the rich could so easily become poor and the poor could so easily become rich, how could anyone know where he stood? In European nations, “aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king,” Tocqueville wrote. And that chain, he believed, was a good thing. It kept a society bound together. The United States had lost the cohesion that comes with an aristocratic tradition, he warned: “Democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it.”

In prewar America, it may have taken pluck and elbow grease to rise above your birth, but in postwar America, what it usually took was a college degree.

Young adults who didn’t have a college degree were almost four times as likely to be living in poverty as those who

It sometimes felt as though the country was splitting into two separate and unequal nations, with a college diploma the boundary that divided them.

“Not only is there an obstacle course to get into college, there’s an obstacle course to get to the college with the name that lets you get the job you want.” For someone like

That was part of what made our afternoon in St. Nicholas Park so painful for her: as far as she could tell, there was no room for error in the new system of American class mobility. Young people from her corner of the Bronx didn’t often get second chances.

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.

Students at community colleges, meanwhile, have about a one in three hundred chance. (Students who don’t attend college at all have about a one in a thousand chance.) The kind of college you attend, in other words, correlates strongly with what you’ll earn later on.

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.

Third, the researchers found that attending an elite college seems to produce a greater economic benefit for students who grow up poor than it does for students who grow up rich.

Ivy Plus colleges, on average, more than two-thirds of undergraduates grew up rich, and fewer than 4 percent of students grew up poor. Elite college campuses are 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.

The American system of higher education has the potential to be a powerful engine of mobility, able to reliably lift young people from poverty to the middle class, and from the middle class to affluence. But in reality, for many young Americans, it functions as something closer to the opposite: an obstacle to mobility, an instrument that reinforces a rigid social hierarchy and prevents them from moving beyond the circumstances of their birth.

Instead, through our current system of higher education, we seem to have reconstructed, in the guise of openness and equality, an old and established aristocracy, one in which money begets money, wealthy families remain wealthy for generations, and young people like Shannen, born without privilege and power, stay stuck at the bottom.

Dale and Krueger did determine that for certain cohorts of students who are typically less advantaged—like black or Latino students, or students whose parents had less education or earned less money—there was a real advantage to attending a more selective school. But not for the well-off children of well-educated white and Asian parents.

Even the wealthiest students at elite colleges receive a huge implicit subsidy from their institutions; on average, students at these colleges contribute just 20 percent of the total amount the institution spends on their education.

These high-prestige institutions are playing the long game—employing what Hoxby calls the “dynasty” model—betting that overspending today on their students will pay dividends in the future when those students become wealthy donors.

And when they do give to universities, it is generally to the nation’s most selective institutions—which are also, as Raj Chetty’s data demonstrates, the institutions with the greatest concentrations of wealthy students.

The Crimson surveys Harvard’s incoming freshmen each year, and its surveys from 2013 to 2017 showed that each new class was slightly more affluent than the previous one. In 2013, 15 percent of Harvard’s incoming freshman class came from families with incomes under $40,000, and 14 percent came from the families in the wealthiest category, those with incomes over $500,000.

increasingly wealthy donors giving increasing amounts of money to increasingly wealthy institutions, thus enabling them to spend increasingly large sums of money educating increasingly wealthy students. It is a phenomenon that seems unsustainable—and yet, at the same time, unstoppable.

Almost every student at the most selective colleges is now very high scoring, in other words, and those colleges are now the only institutions that most very-high-scoring students will attend.

The very predictable decision algorithm that she had discovered among high-scoring students (Always go to the most selective school that will admit you) actually only held true, reliably, for one particular group of high-scoring students: affluent ones.

There were plenty of high-achieving low-income students out there. In fact, Hoxby and Avery calculated that in each national high school graduating cohort there were about thirty thousand students with excellent academic records—a GPA of A minus and above, plus ACT or SAT scores that placed them in the top 10 percent of test-takers, meaning 29 and above on the ACT or 1300 and above on the SAT—whose family income fell in the bottom income quartile, meaning their parents earned less than about $42,000.

In contrast to that small, ambitious group, the majority of high-scoring low-income students had aspirations that seemed much more constrained.

Hoxby and Avery referred to members of this cohort as “income-typical” students, their college decisions defined by their socioeconomic status and not by their academic ability.

Taylorsville is one of those American places, as Caroline Hoxby found in her research, where high-achieving low-income kids are often overlooked by selective colleges: it is sparsely populated, almost everyone is white, and only one in seven adults has

financial-aid paperwork. On the whole, Kim felt as though her family was trying to hold her back from college rather than help guide her there.

In Kim’s family, what was valued most highly was not personal achievement; it was family loyalty. Kim’s mom treated her wayward boys like prodigal sons, welcoming Trevor home after his misadventures, inviting Orry to move back in after his marriage failed, along with his new girlfriend, her two children, and his own two kids.

“It drives me so crazy,” she told me, “because no one in my family has a plan but me. But I’m the bad guy for having a plan and not wanting to be in Taylorsville. They think I’m antifamily. They give me such crap. They say, ‘You don’t even want to be here.’ But that’s not my goal. My goal is to go to college. And college just so happens not to be here.”

For Kim, going to Cornell would have meant defying her family’s traditions, ripping herself out of its fabric, moving to a part of the country where she had no ties and no cultural touchstones. Even going away to Clemson—a public university less than two hundred miles from home—had created divisions and rifts in her family that had not yet entirely healed.

And it was appealing, too, for a certain audience, to think that the ultimate responsibility for the imbalances lay not with the universities, or with the higher-education system at large, but with the students, who were simply uninformed and misguided about where their most promising opportunities lay.

Are the demographic disparities evident on the nation’s college campuses primarily the result of decisions made by students? Or do they have more to do with decisions made by the colleges themselves? And if we do want to level the college-going playing field for the country as a whole, is the best approach really to focus so much money and effort on getting a few more high-performing students to attend a small number of elite institutions?

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.

When it was first developed, “SAT” stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test, and the exam was, for many years, presented and marketed to the public as a test of aptitude, an inherent intellectual ability that was independent of the work students did in school. There was no point in studying for the SAT, according to the College Board: you either were born with this magical thing called aptitude or you weren’t.

The ACT was intended as a contrast to the SAT in almost every way. It was headquartered in Iowa City, far from the coastal elites. Its questions were more straightforward and more aligned with what public school students were studying, with none of the obscure vocabulary words and cognitive traps that for many students made the SAT an ordeal. Unlike on the SAT, if you guessed wrong on a question on the ACT, you didn’t lose points.

The original notion at the heart of the SAT was that it would overthrow the country’s existing inherited aristocracy and replace it with a more democratic meritocracy; the test would locate genius wherever in American society it was concealed and help raise those intellectual standouts to positions of privilege and power. But as the SAT expanded, evidence mounted that the students who tended to excel on the test looked a lot like the scions of that old aristocracy. Rich kids reliably did better than poor kids; whites did better than blacks. That wasn’t particularly controversial

What had been intended as a tool to disrupt the reigning American class hierarchy was increasingly perceived as an instrument that perpetuated it. Crusading journalists, African American psychologists, even the reform activist Ralph Nader: all lined up to take a whack at the SAT, deriding it in articles and reports as a tool of discrimination and oppression.

Which meant that test-prep coaches could help them study for it. And the College Board had long insisted that test prep simply didn’t work. This article of faith had been under siege for quite a while—ever since 1946, in fact, when a recent graduate of New York’s City College named Stanley Kaplan, the son of a Brooklyn plumber, began offering SAT-prep classes in the basement of his parents’ home in Flatbush.

Katzman’s success—and the improved test scores that his rich students started boasting about—reinforced the growing public perception that a student’s performance on the SAT was primarily a reflection not of his aptitude or his achievement, but of his parents’ financial resources.

Among students who spent any time practicing on Khan, those who are Asian, male, and with more educated and higher income parents spent more time on Khan.” It was true, as Coleman and Khan had claimed, that black students, on average, spent a bit more time using Official SAT Practice than white students did. But the advantage that black students had over white students in study time was the only instance of a traditionally disadvantaged group using the site more than a traditionally

that the SAT is not designed to measure your math ability. It is designed to measure your ability to take the SAT.

felt way more confident,” Ben said. “Once you realize that there are loopholes and backdoors to the test, it loses its value. If you can skirt around what they want you to do and still get the right answer, you realize at that point that they’re not really testing skills.”

Ben’s unusual experience in the world of college admissions had given him a unique perspective on the intersections between social class and higher education in the United States. Because a few influential and well-connected people decided they liked and believed in him and took him under their collective wing, he was able to get a rare glimpse into what applying to college is like when you have money and power.

But she had a second defining interest, both personally and intellectually, and that was race: the complicated and thorny question of what it meant to be black in America.

that’s what you want to pursue, you would probably do better to major in African American studies. To KiKi, already on high alert for signals of rejection and exclusion, it felt like a slap: We don’t want you here.