Scrape off the crude instrumentalism and scapegoating malice of the American right’s current hatred of higher education for a moment and there is something of a real issue underneath the crud—a problem that leftward critics of the university have been talking about for decades, and that we get more and more factual confirmation of every passing year, most recently through a new major study by Raj Chetty and his collaborators that affirms that highly selective colleges and universities are effectively “affirmative action for the rich”, that they are contributors to accelerating wealth inequality and constraints on social mobility.
Chetty’s latest study has a lot of nuances to it, pointing out that for the most part, the advantage that the wealthy have in being admitted to elite higher education matches superior preparation for academic study. E.g., legacy admits—or just plain ‘rich person admits’—aren’t academically underqualified. (With one uncomfortable exception in Chetty’s analysis, which is that athletes from wealthy families are on average less academically prepared despite being more likely to be admitted and their long-term professional outcomes after undergraduate education aren’t as affected by attending an elite private; even that shows the interesting complication that this effect disappears in highly selective flagship public R1 institutions.)1 If you somehow completely blanked out everything about wealthier applicants except their academic performance and got rid of every subjective element of an application—even if you used a lottery system for admission that had a preparation threshold—the wealthy would be overrepresented in what Chetty et al call the “Ivy-Plus”.
That’s the engine that is leading to inequality, which is that socioeconomic advantage is increasingly accumulative not just in terms of transmitted wealth but far more importantly in terms of social capital: wealthier families (and ahem, the children of faculty, whether wealthy or not) have 18 years of generally superior preparation to function in higher education that combines both academic training and insight into the ways that higher education and the professional and economic worlds that follow operate.
Accelerating inequality is a problem, perhaps the problem, of American society in the 21st Century. Chetty’s organization, Opportunity Insights, describes its focus as “the fading American dream”. So the question is, what to do about it? For anyone that wants to stand in the way of that acceleration, Chetty’s recent work implies among other things that the biggest push ought to be before undergraduate education. But it’s unclear what that might be beyond dramatically increasing funding and support for K-12 public education. Even in the best-case shift in that respect won’t really touch the edge that Groton, Choate, Exeter, Andover, etc. confer; the edge that a household full of books and intellectual discussion confers; the edge of social knowledge and social capital outside of the public school.
Elite higher education sometimes tries to dodge its role in the problem by accurately pointing out that they train an incredibly small number of the overall graduates in the United States (more than a few of whom will be returning to other countries for their careers) and that the real problem is the dramatic and accelerating underfunding of public higher education over the last three decades, that no matter what Harvard or Duke do in admissions, they can’t by themselves reverse overall inequality. That’s true and it’s a crucial point. Every Ivy Plus institution identified by the researchers could tomorrow decide that they would only admit students from households earning $70,000 or less period and that would be numerically only a slight shift in the vastness of the distribution of wealth in the coming generation. To really move the needle, you’d have to drop tuition at public universities by a major amount while maintaining or increasingly the quality of education they offer.
With one exception, and that’s what Chetty’s overall work focuses on, which is the composition of the leaders of American society and the mostly highly-paid and desired professions that require educational credentials and the knowledge that higher education provides, traditionally one of the major targets of social mobility. You’d change that if you somehow outright denied the families of wealthy Americans (and faculty children) access to the most privileged private and public institutions, essentially telling them, “Start over and scratch for your own worms”.
A few years back a colleague of mine and I did an exercise with a group of students where we used a chart developed by the New York Times that was focused on this data. The chart represented the relationship between household wealth and the probability of attending college; the gimmick was that the reader had to complete the chart themselves and then see it compared to the real data. Essentially it was asking what your intuition was about the relationship between attending college and wealth. What our students predicted was that there would be a drop-off around the upper 5% of the wealth distribution, that the extremely wealthy would have no need to attend college because they already had their trust funds in hand and plenty of social connections that would let them walk in the door into all sorts of interesting work without any specific educational credential.
It was a reasonable prediction! If college really is just about the jobs, then people who have no need to acquire a particular educational training in order to make a decent living should just skip it. But in fact, when you unveil the real chart, at the absolute upper limits of the household income distribution, you come pretty damn close to 100% enrollment in university. Why? Because universities today provide social capital, they provide reputation, they set the culture of economically privileged cultural worlds and highly trained professional workplaces alike. The child of an extremely wealthy family doesn’t want to feel out of place in the company of many wealth-adjacent upper middle-class professionals. If they have some great avocation or project in life—running a non-profit or foundation, pursuing a mission of some kind, collecting art, whatever it might be, they need some of the knowledge and more important the social cachet. And I don’t want to simplify things too much here: there are also people like Abigail Disney who move into adulthood determined to unravel the structures that handed them undue advantages and they also benefit from college. In some sense, everybody does, or at least can.
Perhaps perversely, these observations end up demonstrating that what many faculty insist upon is actually true, which is that college is not just a job credential, that more abstract skills and methods—critical thinking, problem solving, emotional intelligence, etc.—are in fact being taught in many universities, not just the elite ones, and that this teaching is part of the generalized institutional environment. (One of the many reasons that conventionalized “learning objectives” favored by some styles of assessment are so wrong-headed, because they usually exclude all the deeply important objectives that happen to be difficult to measure or particularize.)
But return now to “what to do about it”? One answer worth exploring is whether the way that social capital operates inside higher education needs to change. I think there are some useful ways to abrade its most baleful manifestations—to assume less about what the content of a curriculum ought to be, to be less concerned about cramming in the maximum amount of content and skills development over four years, to be more persistently introspective and expressive about what we think good writing, good speaking, good thinking is and why we think so. But at some point, we’re going to run smack into the question of where what we value stops being an arbitrary sign of distinction in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense and starts being materially and functionally real, grounded in something more than just the maintenance of hierarchy or the substance of ideology. Skilled brain surgery is not just dispositionally valued, and for that matter, the difference between a well-made work of culture and a shoddily-made one isn’t either.
So maybe one thing we could be doing in higher education is thinking about the value of credentials in a society structured by markets and scarcity. I’m fully on board with the dream of a human world built around “from each according to ability, to each according to need”, where we wouldn’t see a mismatch between the demand for skilled surgeons and the supply of the same as necessitating that the skilled surgeons be rewarded disproportionately. But if you hold off all rethinking and reform waiting for the perfected reconceptualization of the world that is, you end up tolerating a lot of terrible outcomes on the thought that all imperfection is alike.
What occupations and professions require a prior base of skills that are almost necessarily learned in rigorous educational environments before someone can even begin to engage in practice that will further hone their skills? What skills are by their nature more difficult to learn in multiple respects (requiring a wider range of prior skills; requiring a longer period of acquisition; requiring more transitional kinds of beginning experience guided by experienced teachers or coaches)? What kinds of occupations and situations do we tend to tie to advanced educational credentials that shouldn’t require those credentials, where the credentials are non-necessary or even counter-productive?
This is a busy zone of cross-talk within public culture, and in particular an area where humanists tend to get especially vilified. (And sometimes vilify each other: recall the in-house controversy when Elaine Showalter tried to argue that a doctorate in literary studies was one of the best ways to train for screenwriting or making digital media without really taking note of the opportunity costs involved in 5-10 years of graduate study where the vast majority of the training would at best indirectly address the concrete work of screenwriting or making digital media.)
Unravelling the tangled skein of this domain of conversation is too big a job for one essay, or even many. But let me propose two initial moves on this chessboard.
There is, or should be, a distinction between the importance of specific educational training—and the credential that results from it—in many professions and the work of leadership in many workplaces and organizations.
There should be a sharp distinction between entry-level positions that require prior educational training and those that do not, between jobs that you can’t learn from scratch through experience and jobs that you can, where specific credentials are not being used to match trained people with jobs requiring training but are being used to filter out many qualified people who could do the job beautifully—perhaps even better than someone who has been trained in an overly narrow and specialized way.
On the first, I’ll say this much as an opening provocation: skilled leadership of most organizations and companies only rarely actually requires specific technical knowledge. Most leaders are not making most of the decisions in their organizations, whatever the org chart shows. They are the symbolic or ceremonial avatars of the organization they lead, they are (sometimes) the final arbiters of otherwise undecided or contentious matters within the organization, and they are a point of interface between the world inside the organization and world outside of it (largely only those points of interface that the organization regards as supremely important and/or threatening that require the symbolic gravitas of a leader’s attention). I’d agree that good leaders need to have well-developed skills, but those skills are generally almost entirely experiential in their development. There’s a long-standing skepticism within creative communities about whether you can actually teach creative work; leadership ought to be even more skeptically regarded. In no other domain is the distortion of pedigree more pernicious—the idea that Ivy Plus graduates should be seen as better candidates for leadership because of their educational preparation is just kind of messed up. Leadership is what ought to exhibit the widest range of pre-career social backgrounds within a given professional world. I’m also unconvinced that the capacity for leadership is scarce and thus needs high market prices. (I think the willingness to do leadership may be scarce because the work can be deeply unpleasant and stressful—but we don’t set compensation in relationship to how unpleasant a particular job is, otherwise CEOs and sewage workers would make the same salary.
On the second, if there is any subject that drives me out of my gourd more in the context of liberal education it is watching universities and colleges that extol themselves as devoted to the liberal arts then turn around and privilege highly specific professional training in making most of their staff hires. There are jobs within a contemporary university that require specific prior educational credentials to be done right, and some that require really specific enumerated skills and knowledge to be done right. I don’t want the person who is in charge of the energy infrastructure on a large, complex university campus to be an affable theater major who totes knows how to look up DIY stuff on YouTube; I want the comptroller to be a CPA or CMA. But there are lots of middle-ranking jobs in almost any large organization where you’d be better off looking for someone with common sense, diligence, and a quick uptake who has a strong base of generalist knowledge than looking for a person with a pertinent credential. (In the context of higher education, I’m going to say that at least some credentialing programs in higher ed management actually undercut common sense and adaptability of their students.) This is where the use of educational attainment as a filter is doing bad work as an accelerant of inequality and an attack on social mobility. Proponents of liberal education often point out that the key people to intervene with in terms of employment is not the leadership, it’s the human resources managers who are doing most of the hiring. The fact that this intervention doesn’t happen even in organizations that are fouling their own nest and messing up their value proposition by privileging specific credentials is telling about how hard it is to make this shift.
There’s only so much that any one link in the long chain binding us to inequality can do to break itself in pursuit of escape out of our present general confinement. But we could start by thinking that leaders aren’t scarce and don’t require specific credentials, just a lot of relevant experience and diverse human skills; we could start thinking much more precisely about when you really have to have a person trained for brain surgery rather than an adaptable and inventive person who will grow into almost anything you hire them to do.
Image credit: Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
See Chetty, Deming and Friedman, “Diversifying Society’s Leaders”, at https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Paper.pdf, for the details of their findings.
"(One of the many reasons that conventionalized “learning objectives” favored by some styles of assessment are so wrong-headed, because they usually exclude all the deeply important objectives that happen to be difficult to measure or particularize.) "
Of course, there are many objectives of education that are impossible to particularize or measure or even clearly explain. Nonetheless, that sort of statement always triggers the "I reach for my revolver" reflex in me, because as you have pointed out in the past, it almost always indicates a teacher who is unwilling to check if they are in fact achieving any objectives at all in their work.