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NEWS: WHITE KIDS STILL MORE PRIVILEGED.
This is from a few days ago, but I just saw this Boston Globe piece via Jack and Jill Politics, which highlights the fact that rich, well-connected white kids are much more likely to push more-qualified students aside for seats at the country's most prestigious schools than black or Latino students, despite all the chatter about the evils of affirmative action.
Peter Schmidt, deputy editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, writes that researchers with access to the college admissions data that many institutions keep a tight guard on found that 15 percent of freshmen at 146 "highly selective" colleges are white students who didn't meet the school's minimum admissions standards for high school GPAs and SAT or ACT scores. There are more than twice as many sub-par privileged white kids at highly competitive institutions than there are black and Latino students whose race gave them a boost in competing for a spot, the researchers found. Some of the white kids are athletes, and many others are the children or friends of alumni, politicians, faculty members, donors, and administrators.
Schmidt also notes that these schools spend just 40 percent of the money for financial aid on students with a documented financial need; the bulk of it goes to students they think will enhance the college's reputation or become big donors later in life. As a result, kids from the wealthiest quarter of the country are 25 times to go to a selective college than the bottom quarter -- so, big surprise, everything about college in America today still perpetuates historical privileges.
Rarely though do you see the weight of that privilege spelled out so clearly. Add to this the indirect privileges of being white, wealthy, and/or well-connected in America, like the greater chance that you'll go to a better high school, take SAT prep courses, be able to do a slew of extracurricular activities, or have doting parents ushering you off to violin lessons or checking your homework. I mean this to both assert the continued importance of affirmative action policies, but also to illustrate that they're not enough alone. Colleges and universities need to have a wider commitment to improving the possibilities for students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds – no matter what color they might be. How can that happen? Well, well-meaning rich donors could require that their donations go toward students who actually need it, and alumni with some degree of sway at their alma mater who want to use their powers for progress rather than perpetuating the status quo could step up. If this article demonstrates anything, it's that colleges are more likely to respond to that sort of pressure than they are to be guided by a fundamental belief that they should be advancing social mobility.
--Kate Sheppard
COMMENTS (14)
As a recent graduate of a "highly selective" college this news report doesn't shock me at all. The college was diverse in the sense that we had many students from other countries and middle-class students of color. But economically the college was about as homogeneous as can be. There were very few of us who came from the lower middle class and below whatever their race. Time for some class-based affirmative action in addition to race-based?
Posted by: Christina | October 5, 2007 12:24 PM
I read an interesting article in the NYTimes Magazine on UCLA about 2 weeks ago. They managed to do a little of both. A lot of work, though.
Posted by: Anonymous | October 5, 2007 12:48 PM
I agree with everything you posted except the perniciousness of the 40/60 split of financial aid between the financially needy and "students they think will enhance the college's reputation or become big donors later in life." If I'm wrong, correct me, but that looks like a fancy way of saying that 60% of the money goes to merit based scholarships. I don't see a problem with ensuring that the best students attend better universities than what they could afford if they were on their own financially.
Maybe not all 60% goes to scholarships, but you haven't divided up the numbers so I've got no way of knowing how much the real percentage is. Also, if I'm reading this wrong, correct me.
Posted by: Patrick | October 5, 2007 1:17 PM
To try to answer Patrick's question, the other 60 percent of aid dollars is a mix of things. Much of it is given out in the form of merit-based scholarships, but there are also scholarships awarded for reasons that have nothing to do with either need or academic merit. A large share is given away as a means of competing for students. The practice of "tuition discounting," or knocking a few bucks off tuition to try to lure an applicant away from his or her first pick among colleges, is widespread in the field. Anyone interested in delving into research on race, class, and college admissions will find my Web site, colorandmoney.com, helpful.
Posted by: Peter Schmidt | October 5, 2007 1:38 PM
Washington institutions, particularly liberal and Dem part ones, really reinforce this dynamic because they only recruit from a tiny circle of schools. the Dem party and liberal DC circles are basically an Ivy dinner club. The Prospect should try to bring in those smart kids who were just as goos as the rih kids but went to a directional state school instead. They would bring a lot to the debate.
Posted by: CalDem | October 5, 2007 2:00 PM
I don't know if the headline is really correct. I think it should be "News: Privileged Kids Still More Privileged." There are a number of white kids from middle and lower socioeconomic backgrounds that are not accepted into the top tier schools. They will do very well at middle tier/state schools but of course their lack of "credentials" will hurt them in the job market.
Posted by: stillonmt | October 5, 2007 2:10 PM
Fair point, stillonmt.
CalDem: Actually, The Prospect is, at least from my perspective. Though in my opinion I come from a position of relative privilege (I'm white, my parents went to college, I definitely didn't grow up destitute by any means), I still couldn't afford to go to any of the "highly selective" schools I was accepted to, and instead went to a smaller, lesser-known school because a wealthy do-gooder provided scholarship money. The Prospect didn't write me off for my lack of "credentials."
Posted by: Kate Sheppard | October 5, 2007 2:25 PM
glad to hear the Prospect is different. I know my point still holds about most Left/Dem institutions in DC. My attempts to get my very bright students into internships, etc., have not gone well, I think largely because I teach at a lower tier UC.
Posted by: CalDem | October 5, 2007 2:35 PM
I'm having a problem seeing the outrage here. According to Schmidt's post on Jack and Jill:
White students who failed to make the grade on all counts were nearly twice as prevalent on such campuses as black and Hispanic students who received an admissions break based on their ethnicity or race.
This means that of unqualified kids at colleges, something like 66% are white and 34% (2:1)are black and Hispanic (I don't know what happened to the Asian kids). These numbers, I believe, are in line with the overall population or even somewhat overweighted towards blacks and Hispanics. So am I supposed to be outraged because blacks and Hispanics aren't more over represented?
Just wondering.
Posted by: David | October 5, 2007 4:22 PM
David,
Without affirmative action programs then 100% of the unqualified kids would be white.
Posted by: Ricky | October 5, 2007 4:33 PM
It's not actually a secret at Duke.
A few years ago there was an article where admistrators there freely admitted that standards were lowered based upon the parents' income.
Their reasoning was that they needed to turn those parents into donors since their endowment is not the size of the Ivies.
Posted by: David | October 5, 2007 7:16 PM
Re:David's "I don't know what happened to the Asian kids" ... that's a point that nobody ever seems willing to address in the context of affirmative action, isn't it?
Posted by: Neil | October 6, 2007 8:41 AM
See, affirmative action should be economic class-based.
I think the intern system adds to the inequalities, who else can afford to work for a pittance than a child of privilege? A job's a job, man.
Dropped out of college myself. I think my subconscious did the math and got me out before my debt reached stratospheric levels.
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