The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us

by Paul Tough

If you rise even one place on the U.S. News list, you will receive more and better applications from next year’s crop of high school seniors. And if you fall even one place on the list . . . well, God help you.

American colleges collectively now give more institutional aid to each student with a family income over $100,000, on average, than they do to each student with a family income under $20,000.

Admit more rich kids. It’s true everywhere: Wealthy freshmen help with your budget. They help with your donors. And they help with your U.S. News ranking, which will then help you to attract more and higher-scoring rich kids to your applicant pool next year.

Boeckenstedt told me. “Admissions for us is not a matter of turning down students we’d like to admit. It’s a matter of admitting students we’d like to turn down.”

There is a popular and persistent image of college admissions in which diversity-obsessed universities are using affirmative action to deny spaces to academically talented affluent kids while they admit low-income students with lower ability in their place. Boeckenstedt says the opposite is closer to the truth. The easiest category of students for most enrollment managers to admit, he explains, are below-average students from high-income families.

students with below-average test scores and above-average family incomes increased their college attendance rates between the early 1980s and the early 2000s by more than 85 percent,

“College presidents can publicly claim that they want more racially and economically diverse incoming classes, while privately demanding that their chief enrollment officer increase revenues and prestige,” Bastedo explained. “Enrollment managers become the faceless, pragmatic technocrats of the institution, while everyone else gets to pretend that all enrollment goals can be pursued simultaneously.”

Researchers have shown that when colleges take steps to become more racially or socioeconomically diverse, applications tend to go down in future years.

According to the College Board’s demographic analysis, those students were twice as likely as students in the inflated-SAT group to be female, twice as likely to be black, and almost three times as likely to be Hispanic. They were three times as likely as students in the inflated-SAT group to have parents who earned less than $30,000 a year, and they were almost three times as likely to have parents who didn’t attend college.

And for another sixth—a group that is disproportionately female, black or Latino, low-income, and first-generation—the SAT is the factor that most significantly undermines their chances.

Students who enroll at DePaul having chosen not to submit their scores do indeed have much lower ACT and SAT scores than students who choose to submit their scores. The average ACT scores of nonsubmitters are about five points lower than those of submitters, which is a substantial gap on the ACT’s 36-point scale. But despite those low test scores, nonsubmitting students do just as well at DePaul as the submitters

When Boeckenstedt looks at all that data, his conclusion is that the nonsubmitters’ low test scores were essentially a false signal, predicting an academic disaster in college that never arrived.

They decided to make the case that high school grades gave an unfair advantage to privileged students, while the SAT benefited less privileged students—despite the fact that their research had for years demonstrated the opposite.

So the data in the paper show that Asian students did gain a significant advantage over black students in college admissions during those fifteen years—but the advantage was entirely due to the rise in their SAT scores, and not to the inflation of their high school grades.

But if the rich student you’re admitting has a higher SAT score than the poor student you’re rejecting, you can tell yourself that your decision was based on their relative “college readiness” rather than their relative ability to pay.

But on the whole, researchers have found, when colleges go test-optional it usually doesn’t change the racial or economic diversity of their incoming class much at all.

“Dentistry, that’s a high-paying career,” she told me firmly. “When you come to college, you have to focus on a major that can get you money. So I put away what I love doing, like public speaking and business and working with people—I put that away in order to seek a career that will give me money, instead of happiness.”

“I think there’s an element of snobbery in America,” proclaimed Stuart Varney, who hosts his own show on the Fox Business Network. “If you work with your hands, you’re down there, and if you work with your brain, you’re up there. And I bitterly resent that.”

low-income college graduates, as a group, derive less financial benefit from their degrees than college graduates from high-income backgrounds derive from theirs.

Autor’s analysis indicates that, yes, Americans with college degrees do earn much more, on average, than those without college degrees. But the growth of that wage premium in recent decades, Autor found, was driven mostly by college graduates who didn’t stop at a BA but went on to earn an advanced degree.

The apparent growth in the college wage premium has come about partly because of the increased salaries of high earners with graduate and professional degrees, and partly because the average income of Americans without a bachelor’s degree has fallen since the early 1970s.

Today, for many young Americans, a BA is simply an insurance policy against moving down. That dark fact has changed the way many of us think about college. It means that the pursuit of a BA has come to feel less aspirational than it once did, and more anxious.

“And it’s all because I didn’t realize that I needed college to be able to get a good job. It’s just crazy how talented people can be, and intelligent—but it’s going to college that matters.”

Across the country, Treisman wrote at the time, freshman calculus had become “a burial ground for the aspirations of myriad students seeking better lives through higher education.”

As pretty much every AP Calculus student or teacher today will tell you, the recent national enthusiasm for AP Calculus is not really about calculus. It’s about college. Taking AP Calculus has become a general-purpose symbol of academic achievement, a signal to college-admissions officers of “eliteness,” the way taking Latin was seen

In one recent survey, 80 percent of college students who had completed AP Calculus said they took it because they thought it would look good on their college applications. And they were right: highly selective colleges are much more likely to admit students who have taken AP Calculus, even if those students have no plans to pursue math or science or engineering in college.

The fact that so many students now take calculus in high school has, according to many math educators, actually undermined the teaching of calculus in college. The fever to accelerate students into AP Calculus means that high schools often rush past the math skills that are truly valuable in college calculus, like a deep understanding of the principles of algebra and trigonometry.

“The result is that even if they are able to pass high school calculus, they have established an inadequate foundation on which to build the mathematical knowledge required for a STEM career.” At the University of Texas, as at colleges and universities across the nation, freshman calculus has become a crucial proving ground, the class that determines, more than any other, whether students will succeed in college and beyond.

Because of the AP Calculus boom, students who arrive in freshman calculus without having taken the subject in high school—which was, remember, the norm not too long ago—now find themselves at a real disadvantage, surrounded by classmates who have already spent a year studying the material that the new calculus students are encountering for the first time. But even students who passed AP Calculus in high school often struggle in freshman calculus; about 40 percent of retakers, nationally, earn a C or below, even though they’ve already passed the course once before. And if you don’t manage to get at least a B in freshman calculus, it becomes very difficult to continue successfully with a major in science, math, or engineering.

“I didn’t want a life that was just the mind,” he told me. “I came from a working-class family. Not doing physical labor felt like a betrayal.”

One was the American story of social mobility—and particularly, the story of social mobility through higher education. It doesn’t matter where you come from, that story goes; a college education will set you on a path to success. The other was the story of math mobility: math skill, according to this story, is not innate; with hard work and good instruction, almost anyone can master even a complex subject like calculus.

We don’t really believe that most people can succeed in higher math, and we don’t really believe that a college education erases social disparities. Even those of us who are inclined to believe still have our moments of doubt.

felt like they knew calculus in their bones, and their math advantage seemed to Ivonne to be inextricable from their social advantages: their educated parents, their excellent high schools, the places they had traveled and the things they had seen.

And she is now on a path to graduate from one of the best public universities in the United States with a degree in higher mathematics—all because the University of Texas was forced to ignore the false signal of her SAT score, and all because she made the choice to risk what Daniels called “an avoidable failure.”

Experts had expected the returning GIs to opt for vocational or technical training to prepare themselves for a career; instead, many of them favored the liberal arts, enrolling in humanities and social science courses at a higher rate than nonveterans.

Among the veterans in her survey who did use the GI Bill to go to college, however, there were many, Mettler wrote, “who experienced breathtaking transformation in their life circumstances.”

Looking back, the oddest thing about the lonesome death of the American Graduation Initiative—and, more broadly, about the nation’s failure to meet Obama’s 2020 pledge—is that no one in power seemed particularly distressed. There were no public apologies. No protest marches. No indignant newspaper editorials. Not even a few mean tweets.

“College” has become in the United States a cultural marker, a signifier we use to divide us from them. Which means that the debates on higher education that were once conducted in the measured vocabulary of market forces and skill development now take place in the heated language of ideology and identity.

sprung from the people and was not forced upon them by a top-down campaign.” And in just a few decades, the American educational landscape was transformed. High school education became free and publicly available almost everywhere in the United States.

The response of individual young people is much the same as it was a century ago. They want more education, because they know that’s what it takes to live a stable middle-class life.

What is different, remarkably so, is the response of the public at large. A century ago, American communities saw that their young people needed more education in order to thrive in a changing economy, and so they came together and figured out a way to provide that education and make it freely accessible.

highest-earning 10 percent of philosophy majors will make an average of $3.5 million over the course of their careers, even more than the highest-earning 10 percent of computer science majors.)