By Fareed Zakaria
Monday, Apr. 15, 2013
It's time for the fat and thin envelopes--the month when
colleges across the U.S. send out admission and rejection notices to well over
a million high school seniors. For all the problems with its elementary and
secondary schools, American higher education remains the envy of the world. It
has been the nation's greatest path to social and economic mobility, sorting
and rewarding talented kids from any and all backgrounds. But there are broad changes
taking place at U.S. universities that are moving them away from an emphasis on
merit and achievement and toward offering a privileged experience for an
already privileged group.
State universities--once the highways of advancement for the
middle class--have been utterly transformed under the pressure of rising costs
and falling government support. A new book, Paying for the Party: How College
Maintains Inequality, shows how some state schools have established a
"party pathway," admitting more and more rich out-of-state kids who
can afford hefty tuition bills but are middling students. These cash cows are
given special attention through easy majors, lax grading, social opportunities
and luxurious dorms. That's bad for the bright low-income students, who are on
what the book's authors, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton, call the
mobility pathway. They are neglected and burdened by college debt and fail in
significant numbers.
The Country's best colleges and universities do admit
lower-income students. But the competition has become so intense and the
percentage admitted so small that the whole process seems arbitrary. When you
throw in special preferences for various categories--legacies, underrepresented
minorities and athletes--it also looks less merit-based than it pretends to be.
In an essay in the American Conservative, Ron Unz uses a mountain of data to
charge that America's top colleges and universities have over the past two
decades maintained a quota--an upper limit--of about 16.5% for Asian Americans,
despite their exploding applicant numbers and high achievements.
Some of Unz's data is bad. His numbers do not account for
the many Asian mixed-race students and others who refuse to divulge their race
(largely from fears that they will be rejected because of a quota). Two Ivy
League admissions officers estimated to me that Asian Americans probably make
up more than 20% of their entering classes. Even so, institutions that are
highly selective but rely on more objective measures for admission have found
that their Asian-American populations have risen much more sharply over the
past two decades. Caltech and the University of California, Berkeley, are now
about 40% Asian. New York City's Stuyvesant High School admits about 1,000
students out of the 30,000 who take a math and reading test (and thus is twice
as selective as Harvard). It is now 72% Asian American. The U.S. math and
science olympiad winners are more than 70% Asian American. In this context, for
the U.S.'s top colleges and universities to be at 20% is, at the least, worth
some reflection.
Test scores are only one measure of a student's achievement,
and other qualities must be taken into account. But it's worth keeping in mind
that the arguments for such subjective criteria are precisely those that were
made in the 1930s to justify quotas for Jews. In fact, in his book The Chosen:
The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton,
scholar Jerome Karabel exhaustively documented how nonobjective admissions
criteria such as interviews and extracurriculars were put in place by Ivy
League schools in large measure to keep Jewish admissions from rising.
Then there's the single largest deviation from merit in
America's best colleges: their recruited-athletes programs. The problem has
gotten dramatically worse in the past 20 years. Colleges now have to drop their
standards much lower to build sports teams. These students, in turn, perform
terribly in classrooms. A senior admissions officer at an Ivy League school
told me, "I have to turn down hundreds of highly qualified applicants,
including many truly talented amateur athletes, because we must take so many
recruited athletes who are narrowly focused and less accomplished otherwise.
They are gladiators, really." William Bowen, a former president of
Princeton University, has documented the damage this system does to American
higher education--and yet no college president has the courage to change it.
The most troubling trend in America in recent years has been
the decline in economic mobility. The institutions that have been the best at
opening access in the U.S. have been its colleges and universities. If they are
not working to reward merit, America will lose the dynamism that has long made
it so distinctive.
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