Privilege v Money

The tone for the quality of formal education is set by the Federal Secretary. The Secretary is appointed by the President. The American people elect the best President money can buy. It is no accident that the last three Presidents have graduated from Yale. Money has to advance the 100 million dollars to get a President elected. Money will elect only those it trusts will stay bought once they are in office.

Formal education will suffer as long as the Presidential election is financed by voluntary contributions. Elections must be financed from the general treasury and all Americans must have an equal chance to compete for every public service job. Then it would be reasonable to expect the Education Secretary to work for quality education for all. Until then, study privilege, because that is all that counts.

William Sumner Scott, J.D.

Judicial Equality Foundation, Inc.

wss@jefound.org

William Sumner Scott, J.D., at 7:55 am EDT on April 11, 2007

Access Struggles

Soares’ findings are salutory, and important for all elite college leaders. I would add three observations.

First, as I found in writing my history of student aid in America (AIDING STUDENTS, BUYING STUDENTS, Vanderbilt UP, 2005), elite institutions varied and fluctuated in how and when they tried to extend access. Although Yale was the first Ivy to announce in 1964 a policy of need-blind admissions coupled with meeting all ‘need,’ the pioneer of this was a prep school, Phillips Andover in the 1950s. In the early 1900s Yale was a leader in developing total packages (grants, loans, jobs) for needy students, but in the 1950s Harvard was ahead of Yale and Princeton in trying to change its social mix. Its intake from ‘working class’ families increased sharply in the late 1960s but fell back just as sharply in the 70s.

Secondly, academic selectivity (even when judged more deeply than test scores) has become more of a barrier to elite-college entry than abiity to pay high fees. In the early 1960s, after big increases in need-based scholarships, a couple of Harvard deans almost wept to find that their low-income intake had not increased. The big gain was by upper-middle income students from the new, suburban professional classes.

Thirdly, Soares may have found that Oxbridge has become more meritocratic, but we elite Brits (I’m one) are not so wonderful and some of the same issues apply there too. In both countries, academic selectivity correlates closely with the institution’s percentage intake from lower income families. I support Soares’ call for economic affirmative action but Britain’s eltie universities have recently joined a torrent of letters in the London Times and Telegraph opposing a government proposal to include parents’ occupations in standard university admissions form.

I’m also not at all sure, judging by the number of my Oxbridge friends whose children get into their old colleges, and my many Harvard classmates whose children do not, that covert alumni preference does not operate in England too. Alumni preference in the USA has received a deserved shallacking in the Wall St Journal and elsewhere, but at last it is open and thereby more subject to control.

Rupert Wilkinson

Rupert Wilkinson, at 9:50 am EDT on April 11, 2007

“How is that all those progressive policies didn’t result in more low-income students, fewer alumni children and generally a more diverse Yale?”

Well, poorer people generally get poorer educations before college, don’t they? Opening your doors to all who are qualified still discriminates against the unqualified, and they undoubtedly come disproportionately from weak public high schools. Perhaps Soares addresses this, or perhaps he suggests that Yale start a low-income high school.

H. Ed., at 4:06 pm EDT on April 11, 2007

SB, and H.Ed too: You have put graphically and well what sociologists keep ponderously rediscovering as the advantages of ‘cultural capital.’ InsideAid: don’t be distracted from the issues by a shorthand phrase. This Brit who called himself an elite member was making a statement of fact and privilege, not of social virtue. I wonder too if Yale has had not received some overkill, but I guess Soares has come up with some new twists in the story.

Rupert Wilkinson, Sociology put well, at 5:20 am EDT on April 12, 2007

Wrong on nearly all counts

I haven’t read Soares’ book, so I can’t comment on it, but I have a lot of problems with this piece. For one thing, I am the author of the linked article (“The Birth of a New Institution”) which Scott Jaschik describes as Yale’s view of its history. Yale had nothing to do with it; the conclusions are mine alone.

Jaschik (and perhaps Soares) is unclear about the case he’s trying to make. Is it the dog-bites-man argument that Yale was an elite school back in the 1920s and is still an elite school in 2007? Or is it the man-bites-dog argument that Yale admissions didn’t change at all during the 1960s?

Jaschik confuses himself as well as the reader by not keeping these arguments separate. His linking Kingman Brewster in the same paragraph with 1920s efforts to restrict Jewish enrollments is slanderous, since Brewster and his admissions dean R. Inslee Clark (1965-70) took Yale from being the Ivy League school with the lowest proportion of Jews to the highest. Nicholas Lemann rightly scorns Jaschik’s contention that “the goal of Yale admissions” – by which he presumably means the goal in the 1960s, not the 1920s – “was to restrict Jewish enrollments and to keep Yale a preserve for a certain kind of establishment.” 1966, incidentally, was not “the height of the period” in which Yale was changing admissions; it was barely the beginning.

Jaschik’s notion that the changes under Clark “didn’t result in more low-income students, fewer alumni children and generally a more diverse Yale” is ridiculous on all counts. Financial aid jumped 30 percent in Clark’s first year in office, while the percentage of alumni children dropped from 24 percent in 1961 to half that by 1967. The mean verbal SAT of the Class of 1970 was equivalent to the seventy-fifth percentile of the Class of 1966 and the ninetieth percentile of the Class of 1961. And if Jaschik thinks that today’s Yale is less diverse than the pre-1965 version that was all-male and 80 percent WASP, it’s difficult to know what could persuade him otherwise.

The competitive-admissions universities should certainly ask themselves whether they’re fostering a new elite and failing to reach out to disadvantaged groups, but the way to stimulate this discussion is not to pretend that the admissions changes of the 1960s didn’t happen.

Geoff Kabaservice

Geoff Kabaservice, at 11:10 am EDT on April 12, 2007

Rupert – Thanks for your response. There are a lot of sticky questions around class and admissions, and I’d be the first to admit that I didn’t go into the subject in great depth in my book or the article. I did devote more space to the issue in my dissertation, and I’d stand by my contention that there was a significant opening to lower-income candidates in the 1960s.

It was not only that the amount of financial aid awarded but also the numbers of financial aid recipients rose significantly during the Clark years… The matriculation rate of financial aid students had been half that of non-financial aid students in the period before Clark’s deanship, a pattern that was reversed by 1970. The larger amount of financial aid offered, and greater publicity about need-blind admissions encouraged more relatively disadvantaged candidates to apply; the greater outreach toward the public schools under Clark (a quadrupling of schools visited by admissions officers) also encouraged that process. The minority students admitted in the latter half of the ‘60s were overwhelmingly from non-advantaged backgrounds, and the reduced proportion of prep school admits also suggests a tilt away from the upper classes – though as you observed, some of the larger prep schools such as Andover had themselves gone into the business of need-blind admissions and wider outreach. (An equivalent “revolution of the public schools” in the UK was actually one of Soares’ major points in his previous book.)

On the other hand, the point you make about cultural capital reinforces David Karen’s main argument, which is that the change in admissions at Harvard and then Yale tilted the process in favor of the children of professionals, broadly speaking, rather than businessmen. That doesn’t necessarily suggest any great social leveling, and neither does the mere fact that large numbers of Jews replaced WASPs in the 1960s; Jews had after all replaced Episcopalians by then as the nation’s wealthiest ethno-religious group overall.

So it could be that what we’re talking about is mainly a story of the rich losing out to the middle class… but the evidence strongly suggests that making Yale more meritocratic also made it more open to talented low-income applicants nationally, at least in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The fact that less than 3 percent of Harvard and Yale students currently come from the bottom economic quartile is indeed a scandal. But to conclude that the same dynamic and conditions must therefore have operated in the 1960s as well, and that today’s elite must be the same as yesterday’s, is post hoc reasoning.

Geoff Kabaservice, at 6:11 am EDT on April 14, 2007

When I lived in New Haven in the 1940’s the Irish and Italians in town were well aware of the pervasive anti-Catholicism of the admissions process at Yale. My father told me of one application from an Irish-Catholic young man that was dismissively tossed into what was referred to as the thick mick file.The city itself was totally divided between Yale and “the others". So when he discusses admissions he might also remember that Catholics(not a Buckley of course) also faced prejudice.

Margaret Tobin, at 2:15 pm EDT on April 29, 2007

There is so little focus here on an issue that has occupied thoughtful Ivy admissions committees since the 1970s: how do you reconcile a research university with a nurturing college? Are the faculty of Ivy League colleges, really and truly prepared and willing to help bright students who have been disadvantaged by poor schooling—and who will inevitably struggle at the beginning as they try to “achieve their dream” of becoming doctors and engineers? Will they be willing painstaking to show them how to start at a fundamental level and to develop and grow? Esecially in the quantitative and writing areas this is very painstaking work. Has anyone actually investigated the statistics of what happens to low income students in their years at these places? Looked at the disaggregated first time fail-out rates (students who struggle, fail out and the painstakingly make their way back) or drop out rates for cohorts? Or asked who is in the 5 or 6 percent osf students who do not graduate from these institutions? Or of those who started out wishing to be doctors, passionately wanted to do that, and never made it (but who might have in a different kind of institution)? The irony is that it is students from more disadvantaged backgrounds who want to enter the areas that require the most quantitative and scientific skills. Is the best place for them at the big research universities that are (ironically) the ones that have the most financial aid to support them? These matters engage complex philosophical and societal issues. The focus in Professor Soares’ book, and in these posts is primarily on ADMITTING low income students. But does anyone pay any attention to what happens to the EXPERIERIENCE such students have when they matriculate? However small the numbers seem, anyone can tell you that one by one, these are individuals, and nurture and guidance require time, devotion and energy. If schools care, they will be thoughtful about admitting students they cannot properly mentor and guide. OR they will commit themselves—it is no easy matter—to figuring out how in a research university, where the discovery, preservation and dissemination of knowledge is at the core of the work, to undertake the exacting caliber of teaching, guiding, and mentoring that is appropriate for students who have not had advantages.

Observer, at 9:55 pm EDT on May 31, 2007