The Educated Elite vs The Country- Part III: Educating the Elites
A few days after Codevilla’s piece appeared in the American Spectator, sort-of-conservative columnist Ross Douthat of the New York Times set off quite a kerfuffle when he did a piece about how the whole elite education selection process works.
Douthat based his column on Russell K. Nieli’s post at the Minding the Campus blog where he analyzed a fairly new report by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Redford dissecting the elite colleges’ admissions policies.
We’ll start with Nieli, political philosopher and one-time Princeton lecturer, who got the whole thing rolling.
Most elite universities seem to have little interest in diversifying their student bodies when it comes to the numbers of born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, lower-middle-class Catholics, working class “white ethnics,” social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children, or older students first starting out in college after raising children or spending several years in the workforce.
Students in these categories are often very rare at the more competitive colleges, especially the Ivy League.
While these kinds of people would surely add to the diverse viewpoints and life-experiences represented on college campuses, in practice “diversity” on campus is largely a code word for the presence of a substantial proportion of those in the “underrepresented” racial minority groups.
The Espenshade and Redford study proved Nieli’s point about diversity.
A new study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and his colleague Alexandria Radford is a real eye-opener in revealing just what sorts of students highly competitive colleges want — or don’t want — on their campuses and how they structure their admissions policies to get the kind of “diversity” they seek.
Not surprisingly race is one factor. But its effect was even higher than one might expect.
According to the data reported in No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal:Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life:
The box students checked off on the racial question on their application was thus shown to have an extraordinary effect on a student’s chances of gaining admission to the highly competitive private schools in the NSCE database.
To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550.
The big news to come out of the study, though—and the part that Douthat would later focus on– is the exclusion of poor and working class whites. While low income bettered the chances for admission for minority students, it decreased them for low income white kids.
According to Nieli:
Espenshade and Radford in their survey found the actual situation to be much more troubling. At the private institutions in their study whites from lower-class backgrounds incurred a huge admissions disadvantage not only in comparison to lower-class minority students, but compared to whites from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds as well.
The lower-class whites proved to be all-around losers.
When equally matched for background factors (including SAT scores and high school GPAs), the better-off whites were more than three times as likely to be accepted as the poorest whites (.28 vs. .08 admissions probability). Having money in the family greatly improved a white applicant’s admissions chances, lack of money greatly reduced it.
The opposite class trend was seen among non-whites, where the poorer the applicant the greater the probability of acceptance when all other factors are taken into account.
Class-based affirmative action does exist within the three non-white ethno-racial groupings, but among the whites the groups advanced are those with money.
There was a huge difference in the acceptance rate of poor white kids and other poor kids:
When lower-class whites are matched with lower-class blacks and other non-whites the degree of the non-white advantage becomes astronomical: lower-class Asian applicants are seven times as likely to be accepted to the competitive private institutions as similarly qualified whites, lower-class Hispanic applicants eight times as likely, and lower-class blacks ten times as likely.
These are enormous differences and reflect the fact that lower-class whites were rarely accepted to the private institutions Espenshade and Radford surveyed.
Espenshade and Radford suggest that schools like Harvard prefer poor minority kids to poor white kids because they’re a twofer. The schools get a doubly good feeling (to say nothing of being able to show statistical compassion in two different categories) because these students are both poor and minority.
Besides, E & R say, the poor white kids probably couldn’t afford the tuition without financial aid anyway.
Nieli responds:
There are problems, however, with this explanation.
While it explains why scarce financial aid dollars might be reserved for minority “twofers,” it cannot explain why well-qualified lower-class whites are not at least offered admission without financial aid.
The mere offer of admission is costless, and at least a few among the poor whites accepted would probably be able to come up with outside scholarship aid.
The truth, Nieli says, is that in order to get a high rating by outfits like U.S. New & World Report, a school must show both a low acceptance rate and a high yield score—the ratio of students accepted to those who actually enroll.
Academic bureaucrats rarely act against either their own or their organization’s best interests (as they perceive them), and while their treatment of lower-class whites may for some be a source of “no small amount of ethical dismay,” that’s just how it goes. Some of the private colleges Espenshade and Radford describe would do well to come clean with their act and admit the truth: “Poor Whites Need Not Apply!”
Although the Espenshade and Radford study does not use the terms Blue State and Red State, Nieli shows that they do show the bias of elite colleges against what he calls Red State values.
It’s commonly assumed that extra-curricular activities boost a kid’s admission chances.
But it turns out that a lot depends on which activities a kid participates in.
Those reflecting Red State values—whether or not the kids actually live in Red States—are a liability for admission.
Nieli says:
But what Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call “career-oriented activities” was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars.
Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis.
The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards.
“Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.”
Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”
This is what Codevilla calls negative selection—excluding certain types of people.
Nieli says:
Future farmers of America don’t seem to count in the diversity-enhancement game played out at some of our more competitive private colleges, and are not only not recruited, but seem to be actually shunned.
It is hard to explain this development other than as a case of ideological and cultural bias.
There’s also a bias against the military:
This same kind of bias seems to lurk behind the negative association found between acceptance odds and holding leadership positions in high school ROTC. This is most troubling because a divorce between the campus culture of its universities and its military is poisonous for any society, and doesn’t do the military or the civilian society any good.
What’s passing for diversity, Nieli says, is actually ideological and political engineering.
If nothing else the new Espenshade/Radford study helps to document what knowledgeable observers have long known: “diversity” at competitive colleges today involves a politically engineered stew of different groups. drawn from the ingredients selected by reigning campus ideology.
Since that ideology is mainly dictated by the Left, it is no surprise that the diversity achieved is what the larger American landscape looks like when it is viewed through a leftist lens.
He makes a suggestion:
I suggest a different approach: elite colleges should get out of the diversity business altogether and focus on enrolling students who are the most academically talented and the most eager to learn.
These students should make up the bulk of their entering classes. Call it the Cal Tech Model since the California Institute of Technology seems to be the only elite institution that comes close to realizing such an ideal.
Or call it the U.S. Olympic Team Model, or the Major League All-Stars Model, since it is based on the same strict merit-selection principle governing our Olympic sports teams and our major league baseball all-star teams.
Let the diversity chips fall where they may and focus on recruiting the most intelligent, most creative, and most energetiic of the rising generation of young people. In my naive way this is what I always thought elite universities were supposed to be about.
Ross Douthat – the designated conservative op-ed columnist a the very liberal, very Establishment New York Times and the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class– picked up on Nieli’s essay and made it news:
Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”
Perhaps Douthat refuses to recognize the consciousness of the Ivy League decision-making process because of his own experience and background: He’s the product of upper-crust New England private schools and a graduate of Harvard.
This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions.
Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.
Espenshade objected to Douthat’s reporting on his report and spoke about it to Katy Steinmetz at Time Magazine. (Interestingly, Epenshade did not respond to Nieli.)
Douthat continued the debate, responding to what Espenshade told Time. ( I’ll insert his replies between Espenshade’s comments.)
Steinmetz:
Douthat cited your study to say that the gatekeepers of elite education seem inclined to exclude the poor of red-state America. You say those findings go beyond your study. How?
Espenshade:
What I think he did was take a relatively minor finding and push an interpretation that goes beyond the bounds of available evidence.
We have this finding that if students held leadership positions or won awards in career-oriented extracurricular activities when they were in high school, there was a slightly negative impact on their chances of being admitted to one of these top private schools.
Now, what are these career-oriented activities? Douthat mentions as possibilities, and I don’t deny it, that it could be participating in a 4-H club or Future Farmers of America, but those aren’t the only types of activities that might fall into that broader category. It could include Junior ROTC. It could include co-op work programs. It could include a host of things. And these aren’t necessarily rural types of activities.
My interpretation is that [having leadership positions or winning awards in career-oriented activities] suggests to admission deans that these folks are somewhat ambivalent about their academic futures.
Douthat responds:
Note that we’re talking about acceptance rates, not the rates at which such students accept offers of admission and matriculate, so it isn’t a question of these kids getting in and then choosing a different, more career-oriented path.
Rather, it’s a question of admissions offices looking at students who went to the effort of applying to elite schools (an act that already suggests a strong interest in an academic future of some sort) and downgrading their chances, for whatever reason, because they excelled in ROTC or the 4-H club or a co-op work program.
Even if an admissions officer believed that such activities reflect ambivalence about higher education, it seems to me that a budding farmer or Army cadet who isn’t certain if he wants to go Yale or Swarthmore is exactly the kind of person that Yale or Swarthmore should want to admit, if it’s real diversity they’re after.
Steinmetz:
Did you find any geographic bias?
Espenshade:
I went back to the original computer output that we generated for this book, and we don’t actually measure rural residence … But what we do know is what state the students lived in when they applied to these top schools, and what we found is that once you know all these other things about an applicant — their gender, whether they’re recruited athletes, SAT scores, race, social class — in most cases it doesn’t really matter what state you’re applying from, but there are some instances where it matters a lot and in a positive direction.
And those instances tend to be students who are applying from red states. So if you are an applicant from Utah and you are in all other aspects identical to someone who’s applying from California, your chances of being admitted to one of our elite colleges or universities are 45 times greater.
We found the same advantages if you’re applying from Montana, from West Virginia, from Alabama.
Douthat responds:
… if you’re concerned about creating an elite that’s broadly representative of the country as a whole, geographic diversity may be a good thing in and of itself, but it’s a very good thing only insofar as it tends to be a proxy for socioeconomic and cultural diversity.
Which it isn’t, necessarily: There are upscale Bobo [a term coined by NYT columnist David Brooks which combines bourgeois and bohemian—in other words, yuppy] enclaves even in states that we think of as rural and “red,” and it’s perfectly possible for an elite school to boost its geographic diversity by admitting Alabamans who attended Indian Springs School or Kansans who went to Pembroke Hill (both of which showed up on Worth Magazine’s list of the top 100 feeder schools for elite university), without actually gaining anything much in the way of socioeconomic diversity along the way.
And Espenshade and Radford’s data on the disadvantages faced by downscale whites (and 4-H club presidents!) suggests that this is basically what’s happening, to a point at least.
Matt Yglesias—Harvard educated and a prominent blogger at The Atlantic Monthly—wonders what all the fuss is about.
People who are plausible admission candidates at Harvard and don’t quite make the cut end up at Columbia or Penn.
People who don’t get into Berkeley go to UCLA. And they all end up fine. There’s just absolutely no need to cry for someone who got into Bryn Mawr instead of Wellesley thanks to affirmative action or legacy preference or structural bias in the SAT or anything else. This is a made-up social problem.
This could probably count as educational elite snobbery to the nth degree.
I’d bet that 99 percent of American college applicants (and their parents) see virtually no difference between the Ivy League Harvard and the equally Ivy League Columbia and University of Pennsylvania. The same holds true for the difference between Bryn Mawr and Wellesley. Maybe not so much UC Berkeley and UC Los Angeles.
Yglesias misses the whole point of the argument, which is: if you’re a white kid from a low- or average-income family there is virtually no way you’re going to get admitted to one of the colleges or universities that sets you on the path to becoming a member of this nation’s “educated elite.”
