The report was centered around four important discoveries. First, using the IRS data, Chetty and his team found that students who attend ultraselective colleges in the United States are much more likely than other students to become very rich as adults. Young people who attend “Ivy Plus” institutions—meaning the Ivy League colleges plus a handful of other institutions with similarly elevated selectivity rates, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, and Stanford—have about a one in five chance of landing, in their midthirties, among the top 1 percent of American earners, with incomes over $630,000. People who attend “other elite” four-year colleges (including Davidson) have about a one in eleven chance of hitting the top 1 percent. Students at community colleges, meanwhile, have about a one in three hundred chance. (Students who don’t attend college at all have about a one in a thousand chance.) The kind of college you attend, in other words, correlates strongly with what you’ll earn later on. Second, Chetty and his collaborators found that outcomes for poor kids and rich kids who attend the same institution are remarkably similar (the definition of “poor” here being that your family’s income is in the bottom quintile, or bottom fifth, of all families nationwide, and the definition of “rich” being that your family’s income is in the top quintile). Poor students who attend Ivy Plus colleges wind up with household incomes of about $76,000 a year, on average, as young adults. Rich students who attend Ivy Plus colleges wind up earning about $88,000. That’s more than the kids who grew up poor, but not a ton more. There is a similar effect at almost every college: kids who grow up rich earn only a bit more than their college classmates who grow up poor. Attending the same college eliminates almost all the advantages that those who grow up with family wealth have over those who grow up in poverty. Third, the researchers found that attending an elite college seems to produce a greater economic benefit for students who grow up poor than it does for students who grow up rich. If you’re a rich kid, attending an Ivy Plus college rather than no college at all increases your odds of making it into the top income quintile as an adult earner by a factor of four. So you do get an economic boost from your college education, but it’s not a huge one. If you’re a poor kid, though, attending an Ivy Plus college rather than no college is truly life-changing. It increases your odds of making it into the top income quintile by a factor of fourteen. So far, these results suggest a pretty happy story for fans of economic mobility. Higher education actually works! It can propel students from all backgrounds into the upper reaches of the American economy. Sending poor students to elite colleges is an especially good investment—they benefit more than their wealthy peers do. And when rich and poor students attend the same college, the education they receive there actually does create a fairly level playing field for them as they head off together into the job market. But that is where the happy story ends. Because the fourth major discovery made by Chetty and his colleagues was that rich and poor students are not attending the same colleges. Not at all. At Ivy Plus colleges, on average, more than two-thirds of undergraduates grew up rich, and fewer than 4 percent of students grew up poor. Elite college campuses are almost entirely populated by the students who benefit the least from the education they receive there: the ones who were already wealthy when they arrived on campus. Using the IRS data, Chetty’s team was able to produce Mobility Report Cards not just for each broad category of college, but for each individual institution. What they found was that while every selective college was tilted in favor of wealthy students, some were tilted more sharply than others. And two of the colleges where the tilt was most extreme were Princeton and Penn, the two colleges that rejected Shannen Torres.
I just had a conversation today about the lawsuit from an Asian against Harvard recently due to the “discrimination” against Asians. The gist of this issue is that , Asians, who tend to score better on average, get less seats than their resume or test scores would justify. An Asian might be rejected rejected compared to other candidates even if they had better scores. Colleges rationale for this is that Asians already take a disproportionate amount of places. In that conversation, the person I spoke to couldn’t fathom how this “reverse discrimination” could even take place in a fair society. In this case, there was no Meritocracy.
But Meritocracy can be misleading. The Inequality Machine is a book that uses college as the one example of that and goes in depth about it. Its basic premise is that students from wealthier families attend elite colleges disproportionately more. Are these students really more capable or better inherently? Or they did just have access to better cram schools, guidance counsellors and opportunities.
This feels like some other conversations we’ve had before on Meritocracy (from the book The Tyranny of Merit), so I won’t go into too much detail about it. However, 1 thing this book focuses on that I thought was interesting was how out of place someone, who came from an under-privileged background, could feel in these “elite institutions”. Even if they were already there on “merit”, there are further barriers in terms of fitting in socially that makes their life in college that tad bit harder.
I’ve been super lucky to grow up in an environment any financial worries, but I’ve definitely felt out of place or having the”you don’t belong” notion back in the days of school. You get that social burden or even anxiety in some sense, especially when interacting with those who have that self-confidence or obviously came from more highly educated families. This feeling general becomes an unwelcome distraction. In the context of the book, there have been under-privileged students who attended elite institutions and just couldn’t fit in and this actually also impacted their results.
Paul Tough goes into more details in the rest of the book, and I’ll be picking some of the more interesting perspectives or anecdotes to share.
I’ve also been much slower in posting updates recently. I am intentionally slowing down to have more time to improve the depth of my reflections and the quality of my writing. This break has also allowed me to think about what I wanna do with this channel going forward, so do stay in touch!
