The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us

by Paul Tough

And as her fellow students continued to file into the precept room, KiKi was aware of another important difference between them and her. She was poor, and most of them were rich. They had spent their young lives in an expansive world of boarding schools and tennis camps and vacation homes, while KiKi’s childhood had been circumscribed by food stamps and subsidized housing and late car payments.

These were liberal arts college students, after all, at the height of the “stay woke” era. But as they all opened their copies of The Odyssey and the discussion began, KiKi couldn’t help but notice that every single seat at the table was now filled—except the two chairs on either side of her. She was isolated and alone in more ways than one.

Liberal woke racism

Raj Chetty’s research revealed that in parallel with this concentration of high-scoring students has come a concentration of wealthy students on highly selective campuses—and an almost complete exclusion, on those campuses, of students from the lowest income tiers.

Being surrounded by so much concentrated

ANTHONY ABRAHAM JACK, a young sociologist at Harvard, has spent much of the past decade compiling a detailed ethnographic study of the lives of first-generation students at elite universities. Not too long ago, Jack was one of those students himself; he was raised in the working-class, mostly black Miami neighborhood of West Grove by his single mother, who worked as a middle school security guard and never earned more than about $30,000 a year.

(The Pell grant is awarded based on financial need; about a third of American undergraduates have family incomes low enough to qualify.)

Jack spent two years doing intensive fieldwork at an elite American college, conducting in-depth interviews with low-income students, and those interviews became the basis for his PhD dissertation and also for his first book, The Privileged Poor, which was published in the spring of 2019.

William, a white student from a small farming town, said he felt shocked when he saw other students going out and buying lobsters to cook for dinner while there was free food in the dining hall. Ryan, a white student from an Appalachian mining town, told Jack about going with affluent friends to an exclusive eating club and almost committing a major faux pas by drinking from the finger bowl.

until she noticed that there was a fourth-grade classroom right next door where the kids looked different. They were all white. Their classroom was nicer, too—better equipped and better organized. She asked one of her new classmates what was going on, and she was told that at Brook Park, students were grouped by ability. The classroom next door was

It was not lost on KiKi, even at age nine, that in order to receive the education she needed and deserved, she had to demand to be separated from her fellow black students and placed among the white ones.

The chief lesson she learned at Brook Park Elementary, she says, was that if she wanted people to take her seriously as a student, she needed to convey a version of herself that would puncture the assumptions they made about her.

Just like at Brook Park, almost all of the black students at Myers Park were placed in “standard” classes, while most of the white students were in “honors.” The most academically ambitious students were enrolled in the school’s International Baccalaureate diploma program. KiKi had never heard of IB before arriving at Myers Park, but she quickly came to understand that the IB classrooms were where the smartest kids in the school could be found, and so IB was where she knew she needed to be. Almost all the other students in her IB classes were white or Asian American, with a few students from well-off black families mixed in. And then there was KiKi: the only poor black kid once again.

So it is possible that Princeton and Amherst and other elite colleges that improved their Pell rates during those years did so not by admitting many more genuinely poor students, but by targeting Pell-eligible students close to the cutoff—the $80,000 Pell students rather than the $30,000 Pell students.

Using IRS data, they calculated the distribution of family incomes for students enrolled in those colleges and found that the schools were admitting only a few students with truly low incomes. The bulk of Pell students had incomes that were just below the federal cutoff. This “distorted behavior,” as Hoxby put it, was made more glaring by the fact that the colleges admitted very few students whose incomes were just above the Pell cutoff.

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.

According to Chetty’s data, Princeton was nowhere near being a leader on socioeconomic diversity during those years. In fact, it was one of the least economically diverse institutions in the database of 2,395 American colleges that Chetty compiled.

Chetty’s data (as I mentioned in chapter 1) showed that only 2.2 percent of Princeton’s students, as of 2013, came from the bottom economic quintile, with family incomes below about $21,000—the quintile that KiKi’s family occupied. Princeton’s was the second-lowest rate in the Ivy League, and one of the lowest figures of any college in the country.

Meanwhile, 17 percent of Princeton students came from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution, and 72 percent came from families in the top fifth of the income distribution, the highest rate in the Ivy League. That means that only a little more than a quarter of Princeton students in 2013 came from the bottom four quintiles—basically, from every group but the rich—a figure that put Princeton behind 99 percent o...

Somehow Princeton managed to double its Pell percentage while only barely increasing the number of actual low-income students on its campus.

The black students she met at Princeton were, in general, the children of well-educated professionals and entrepreneurs and corporate executives. They had grown up, mostly, in two-parent families, with family money, going to private schools. Those differences in their experiences created barriers that KiKi sometimes found hard to cross.

There was one other thing KiKi noticed about Princeton’s black freshmen: many of them were the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves, their parents having moved to the United States from Africa or the Caribbean, often for work or graduate school. That was something KiKi hadn’t expected. Though she had grown up in mostly black communities, she hadn’t met many kids from Africa.

The first people to bring it to public attention, more than fifteen years ago, were two of the nation’s most prominent black intellectuals, Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates Jr. At a reunion of black alumni of Harvard in the fall of 2003, Gates and Guinier pointed out that most of the alumni in the room were first- or second-generation immigrants from the Caribbean or Africa or the children of mixed-race couples. 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.”

Massey’s paper showed that Gates and Guinier were right: first- and second-generation immigrants were vastly overrepresented among black students at highly selective American universities. And the more selective the university was, the higher its ratio of immigrant blacks to native-born blacks.

In a keynote speech at the 2017 conference of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, Shaun Harper, executive director of the Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California, made a rather dramatic charge. He suggested that Ivy League colleges were essentially colluding with one another to keep their black student populations at exactly the same level.

At this litigious moment in the history of affirmative action, admissions officers at those colleges would be anxious to assure you that they do not collude, especially on matters of admissions and race. But when you look at the data, it is hard to refute Harper’s point. The numbers really are startlingly consistent. 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.

The sociologist Jerome Karabel, in his book The Chosen, reported that way back in 1984, Harvard’s freshman class was . . . 8 percent black. More recently, Princeton’s undergraduate student population has been precisely 8 percent black every year since 2008—except for 2011 and 2012, when it briefly dipped to 7 percent.

Massey found that at highly selective universities, students descended from voluntary immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean are more likely to have attended private school than students descended from Africans brought to the United States in slavery. They are more likely to come from intact two-parent households. Their fathers are much more likely to have graduated from college and to hold an advanced degree. And their SAT scores are, on average, more than fifty points higher. Admitting those students, instead of students like KiKi, solves two problems at once for Princeton’s admissions department. Princeton can hit its 8 percent black-student target (if, indeed, it does have a target), while still admitting students who, in every way but their race, have backgrounds a lot like the rest of Princeton’s student body.

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

Jack believes that they favor students from the Privileged Poor over the Doubly Disadvantaged as a way to “hedge their bets on diversity.” Graduates of Choate or Andover are a known quantity in Ivy League admissions offices. Graduates of the large, mostly low-performing public high schools where the vast majority of low-income black American students spend their days are not.

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.

“Academic life at Renowned, as at every university, is inherently social,” Jack wrote. Privileged Poor students intuitively understood that fact, because the same principle had been true in private school. Professors were authority figures, yes, but they were to be engaged with, not deferred

“Trying to figure out when, how, and even why personal connections are needed can paralyze them.”

It wasn’t just that these students didn’t know how to fraternize with professors. It was that they found the practice distasteful, bordering on immoral. That

‘You don’t want to get where you are based on kissing ass, right? You want it based on hard work. It’ll take longer, but there’s more value to it. You’ll feel more proud.’”

“These kids who go to professors after class and just talk to them,” he said to Jack. “I have no idea what they’re talking about. I don’t have any questions beyond what they’re teaching. They’re kiss-asses! These people want recommendations, a spot in this guy’s research team. I never wanted to grovel.”

“The Doubly Disadvantaged express strong faith in the idea of meritocracy—believing that focusing on ‘the work’ is enough for success—but they actually stand to lose the most for believing so,” Jack wrote. “Good work may bring recognition, and hard work may be rewarded, but academic performance alone is not always how you get ahead or get what you need in college.”

dominant “alpha group” had emerged in the classroom discussions, she explained, led by one young white man, a loud talker who had no qualms about “weaponizing his intelligence,” as she put it—steering the conversation, stealing focus.

“There’s a way that an intellectual here is supposed to act,” she explained. “There’s a perception. You’re either an intellectual or you’re not. There’s a look.” It wasn’t just the color of her skin that made her an outsider, KiKi said. It was the fact that she wore crop tops and Air Jordans and box braids. She didn’t fit the profile, and everyone knew it.

“Poor people don’t become philosophers,” she explained. “Or at least they don’t become philosophy majors at Princeton.”

The other students were prepared and informed as well. But when they contributed their thoughts, they often gave the impression of doing so ironically, of being somehow above it all.

The agreed-upon posture in precept, for everyone but KiKi, was to be ostentatiously laid back—amused, but not aroused. Pop culture, high culture: same trope, different day.

In the game KiKi was playing, you scored points by being the smartest and the most well-read. In the game everyone else around the precept table was playing, you scored points by being the cleverest and most at ease.

Her 2015 book Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs investigates the role, in college and beyond, of “cultural capital,” a phrase coined by the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to describe the knowledge and manners and taste that established families and institutions quietly pass on to their children to enable them to remain in the upper classes as adults.

wasn’t just that she couldn’t afford what they had, it was also that she often didn’t understand what they were talking about. “There were these rules of being that everyone seemed to know,” she said. “Everyone except for me.”

attributed a lot of what happened in college, the feeling of a lack of belonging, to something about me,” she said, “rather than thinking: This is systemic. These are wealthy institutions filled predominantly with extraordinarily wealthy people, and there is no escape.” When Rivera graduated from Yale in the spring of 2000, she followed a postcollege path common to many Ivy League grads: She got a job in management consulting, spending two years working for the Monitor Group, based in London.

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.”

They still believed in “the work,” in other words, in the version of the American meritocracy they had been taught as children to respect and put their faith in. And their chances to land a lucrative job after college suffered as a result.

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.

The more high-scoring students you admitted, and the more students of any kind that you rejected, the better U.S. News liked you. DePaul, where Boeckenstedt works, accepts about 70 percent of the students who apply, and the students who enroll have an average SAT score of about 1200; U.S. News ranks it 119th on

But this widely shared distaste for the list doesn’t mean people in admissions ignore it. Quite the opposite. They know that American high school students and their families take the U.S. News rankings very seriously.