The Inequality Machine
CHAPTER II: Getting In
Among economists, though, this question has long been a matter of debate. Proponents of a more laid-back approach to college admissions base their argument largely on a 2002 paper, updated and extended in 2011, by Stacy Dale, a researcher, and the late economist Alan Krueger. Dale and Krueger analyzed records from twenty-seven selective colleges and universities, as well as a national database, and concluded that for well-off white and Asian students, there was no benefit at all, in terms of future earnings, to attending a more selective college. Yes, a graduate of Princeton will earn more than a graduate of Penn State, on average--but, the researchers said, that has everything to do with the talents and ambitions of the students whom Princeton admits.
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Hoxby has focused her research for more than a decade on the college-admissions process. But for many years, she avoided the debate over the relative value of attending a selective college. She was always somewhat skeptical of the methods that Dale and Krueger used, but she considered the available data too muddy either to confirm or rebut their conclusion. More recently, though, that muddy picture clarified for Hoxby, when she found a way to leverage many years of tax records--using the same IRS database that Chetty draws on for his research--to calculate "value-added" estimates for thousands of American colleges and universities.
Her method, briefly, involves combining the IRS data showing which college each student attends and their earnings a decade after graduating from high school with information from the College Board on where students apply, plus data from a national clearninghouse that reveals which college each student actually winds up attending. By merging these data points, and comparing them for millions of students who graduated from high school between 1999 and 2003, Hoxby was able to estimate, quite precisely, the causal effect of the college a student attends on his or her average lifetime earnings.
Her conclusion? Dale and Krueger were simply wrong. High-prestige colleges do pay off for the students who attend them, and in fact they pay off in a big way.
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CollegePoint counted an advising relationship as a success only if the student ended up enrolling in an Aspen 270 college. But the advisers I spoke to found the Aspen list to be rigid and arbitrary; in the real world of high school students, they believed, sometimes a school that wasn't on the list was a better choice than a school that was. For instance, the only historically black college on the Aspen 270 list was Spelman, a women's college.
CHAPTER III: Fixing the Test
It was true that studying for twenty hours on Official SAT Practice was associated with an average score gain of 115 points. But what the College Board didn't tell the public was that very few students had studied that many hours. The College Board sent invitations to 1,075,000 students in the high school class of 2017, encouraging them to link their College Board account to a free account on Khan Academy. Fewer than a quarter of those students -- 250,000 -- actually linked their accounts. Most of those 250,000 students studied for just a few hours, or not at all. Only 8,000 students across the country did at least twenty hours of practice and achieved that average gain of 115 points...
This is where dealing with the College Board grew especially frustrating--and my faith in the organization's good intentions began to wear thin. If only a tiny percentage of students studied for twenty hours, why lead your public presentation with that group's results? When I spoke later than summer with Aaron Lemon-Strauss, the College Board executive who led the collaboration with Khan Academy, he explained that the decision had been driven by a desire for positive media coverage. There was an original draft of the press release, Lemon-Strauss explained, that featured a chart comparing the effect of zero hours of Khan study (an average gain of sixty points over students' PSAT scores), with the effect of five hours (an average gain of eighty-four points) and ten hours (an average gain of ninety-seven points). That chart would have indicated much smaller gains than the numbers the College Board eventually released, but they would have been more representative of what typical students actually achieved using Official SAT Practice.
Lemon-Strauss told me he liked that version, but he explained frankly that it was rejected by the College Board's communications team.
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And because the effect of an hour of study on a student's score gain was consistent among all these groups, the extra hours of study that the more privileged students took advantage of meant that their scores increased more, as well. On the whole, according to the data from the hackathon, Official SAT Practice on Khan Academy had increased the existing gaps between students in groups that tended to score higher on the SAT and students in groups that tended to score lower.
CHAPTER IV: Fitting In
[Tony] Jack spent two years doing intensive fieldwork at an elite American college, conducting in-depth interviews with low-income students, and those interviews became the basis for his PhD dissertation and also for his first book, The Privileged Poor, which was published in the spring of 2019. Following the traditional practice of sociologists, he uses pseudonyms in the dissertation and the book for the students he interviewed, and he also uses a pseudonym -- Renowned University -- for the institution where he did his fieldwork. Since I'm not a sociologist, I'm not obliged to follow the conventions of sociology, so I can tell you that I'm pretty certain the university where he did his fieldwork was Harvard, since that's where he was working and studying during the years he was conducting his interviews.
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When KiKi first arrived, she was assigned to a classroom full of students who looked a lot like she did. That didn't seem out of the ordinary to KiKi -- she had always been in classrooms full of kids who looked like her -- until she noticed that there was a fourth-grade classroom right next door where the kids looked different. They were all white. Their classroom was nicer, too -- better equipped and better organized. She asked one of her new classmates what was going on, and she was told that at Brook Park, students were grouped by ability. The classroom next door was a "stretch" classroom. Those kids were the smart kids.
If it hadn't been for Ms. Denise the year before, KiKi might not have had the thought that came into her mind next, or at least she might not have expressed it out loud: "But I'm on the of the smart kids." But because Ms. Denise had helped convince her to be confident in her intelligence, KiKi did say it, and she kept saying it: _I belong next door._
She talked to her teacher, and the she talked to the principal, and then she persuaded her mom to come in and raise a fuss on her behalf. Though they were resistant at first, the school's administrators finally agreed to let her take a placement test. KiKi aced it, and the next day she was moved to the stretch classroom.
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At Myers Park, the nameless fury that KiKi had felt as a fourth-grade student was focused and honed into an intensely felt racial awareness. kiKi was still reading the biggest, fattest, white-establishment novels she could carry: _The Satanic Verses, Gravity's Rainbow, Sense and Sensibility._ But she also started reading Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver. She studied the Blank Panthers and MOVE, the radical black group whose headquarters were firebombed by the Philadelphia police in 1985. She started a pro-black group at Myers Park called PRIDE, and she organized a race symposium to discuss the racial disparities in the makeup of the school's standard and honors and IB classes.
But despite KiKi's full embrace of her black identity, she still felt stuck int he middle. The high-octane education she was receiving meant she spent her days physically separated from the black kids in the standard classrooms. "I don't have a connection to the black student body," she told me when I visited Myers Park during her senior year. "Which is significant to me because that's who I'm fighting for. But to be frank, I don't have much of a connection with anyone at my school."
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Over the summer, KiKi had been invited to take part in Princeton's Freshman Scholars Institute, or FSI, a free seven-week orientation program for first-generation and low-income students. She had fun, and she met some people she liked, but there were only a few black kids in the group, and in general the students she met at FSI seemed more working-class or lower-middle-class than gennuinely poor. Their experiences growing up were nothing like KiKi's. "My definition of low income is a lot different than Princeton's definition of low income," KiKi explained with a laugh when we spoke on the phone that summer. When the rest of the freshman class arrived in September, the income divide on campus only grew sharper. Everyone around KiKi seemed downright wealthy.
So what was the deal? Demographic revolution, or all-pervading affluence? What was the Washington Post seeing on the Princeton campus that KiKi was not -- and vice versa?
The answer to that question beings with an understanding of the way Princeton and other institutions calculate the economic diversity of their campuses. The statistic that the post cited is the statistic that pretty much everyone uses: the percentage of the student body, or of the freshman class, that is eligible for a federal Pell grant. "Pell percentage," as it is sometimes called, is a useful marker in many ways, and it is a figure that the efderal government collects and reports for each college. But it is also something of a moving target... some families making more than $80,000 receive Pell grants, and some earning less than $30,000 do not.
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In the same way that admissions officials at those college might find it easier to admit middle-class Pell grant recipients rather than poor ones, or the black children of immigrants instead of the black descendants of American slaves, Jack believes that they favor students from the Privileged Poor over the Doubly Disadvantaged as a way to "hedge their bets on diversity." Graduates of Choate or Andover are a known quantity in Ivy League admissions offices. Graduates of the large, mostly low-performing public high schools where the vast majority of low-income black American students spend their days are not...The second big conclusion Tony Jack reached in his research was that Doubly Disadvantaged students had a much rockier experience once they got to college than Privileged Poor students did. And the most stressful part of the transition wasn't the academic work (though that was often stressful as well). It was their daily interactions with their fellow students.
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The other students were prepared and informed as well. But when they contributed their thoughts, they often gave the impression of doing so ironically, of being somehow above it all. They cracked knowing jokes and leaned back in their chairs with a studied nonchalance. The alpha dude took great pleasure, at one point, in comparing the character of Dionysus in Euripides's _Bacchae_ to Walter White, the meth-dealing antihero of _Breaking Bad_. The agreed-upon posture in precept, for everyone but KiKi, was to be ostentatiously laid back -- amused, but not aroused. Pop culture, high culture: same trope, different day.
In the game KiKi was playing, you scored points by being the smartest and the most well-read. In the game everyone else around the precept table was playing, you scored points by being the cleverest and most at ease.
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If you are looking for reassurance that the American meritocracy is fair and democratic and open to all, Pedigree is not the book for you. Backed up by her meticulous research, Rivera managed, in 350 pages, to undercut and overturn many of the stories we like to tell ourselves about who succeeds in the United States and why. It turns out it really _does_ matter where you go to college -- at least if you want to work in certain high-paying professions. Lacrosse bros really _do_ run the world. It really _is_ who you know, not what you know. An investment banker really _did_ tell Rivera that it was "difficult" for women to be hired by his bank if they weren't "pretty." ("I mean, you don't have to be _hot," he clarified. "But you do need to be reasonably attractive.")
Rivera's central finding was that top law firms and management consulting companies and investment banks -- known collectively as "elite professional service" or EPS firms -- based their entry-level hiring decisions not on what candidates had achieved in college, but on who they were when they arrived at college years earlier...
If you have the misfortune to attend a college below the second tier, your application is more or less doomed. "I'm just being really honest, it pretty much goes into a black hole," a female recruiter explained to Rivera. "Unfortunately, it's just not a great situation. There's not an easy way to get into the firm if you're not at a target school."