A simple way to democratize higher education

It is an open secret that the most selective U.S. colleges largely admit the children of the wealthy. Graduates of these colleges go on to be greatly overrepresented among the ranks of the economic and political elite. It is a system that perpetuates class hierarchy within and across generations.

Public shaming will do little to change it. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get an institution to understand something when its endowment depends upon not understanding it.

Instead, Congress should require selective colleges to set their admissions requirements with Department of Education oversight. Each college would be free to choose its own admissions criteria, but these criteria would have to satisfy a federal standard of equal opportunity. 

Congress has long imposed such a requirement on another set of elite institutions: banks. The Community Reinvestment Act requires banks — in partnership with their federal regulator — to “meet the credit needs of the local communities” in which they do business.

Selective colleges should be required to meet the educational needs of students from working and middle-class families.

The facts of income segregation in America’s most selective colleges are not in dispute. A student whose parents are in the top 1 percent of the income distribution is 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy Plus institution than a student from the bottom 20 percent, and the Ivy Plus have more students from the top 1 percent than the entire bottom 50 percent.

Attending an Ivy Plus may not be a ticket to the very top, but the odds are ever in your favor. The share of private-sector leaders with an Ivy Plus graduate degree is 22 percent for the Forbes 400 richest, 23 percent for Russell 1000 CEOs, and 40 percent for the top 120 nonprofits. The share of government leaders is 100 percent for the U.S. Supreme Court, 36 percent for the Federal Circuit Courts, 17 percent for the U.S. Senate, and 20 percent for the president’s Cabinet.

The Ivy Plus educates less than 1 percent of secondary students, so the magnitude (20-40 times) of their disproportionate representation among the nation’s most powerful is staggering. This makes Ivy Plus admissions an issue of public concern, even though they are too small and too expensive to be a mass vehicle of upward mobility for low-income students. 

The good news is that for low-income students who manage to attend, the Ivy Plus are engines of economic mobility. Ivy Plus students from the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution can expect to earn about the same as their classmates from the top 20 percent. There is mounting evidence that friendship and other social ties across class lines are perhaps the most important drivers of upward mobility. Unfortunately, the evidence also shows that U.S. colleges are as segregated by income as the average U.S. city.

Selective colleges should be democratized. They benefit, at a minimum, from federal tax exemptions, federal grants and federal loans to students to pay tuition. Congress should make these and other benefits conditional on Department of Education oversight and review of admissions policies.

There is no fixed formula for what criteria college admissions should consider, but the intended and unintended effects of these criteria need to be examined and justified.

For example, if admissions were based solely on test scores — holding all else constant — the representation of middle-income students at selective schools would rise by more than one-third. In other words, wealthier students score much higher on non-test criteria. This is likely because they can afford the type of experiences that get the attention of an admission officer.  

This finding doesn’t imply that admissions should be based solely on testing or on academics. Rather, it implies that colleges should have to design their test and non-test admissions criteria — with federal oversight — in ways that do not unjustifiably produce class disparities.

The required changes to admissions are achievable. If low-income students were treated as if they were children of alumni, their representation would be equal across selective and non-selective colleges.

The alumni of selective colleges play an outsized role in our republic, based in no small part on their parents’ resources and an acceptance letter received in their youth. It is time for Congress to open the doors of these ivied halls to the people. 

Prasad Krishnamurthy is a professor of law at U.C. Berkeley School of Law.