Elite College Data Point

William Deresiewicz writes,

In 1985, 46 percent of incoming freshmen at the 250 most selective colleges came from the top quarter of the income distribution. By 2000, it was 55 percent. As of 2006, only about 15 percent of students at the most competitive schools came from the bottom half. The more prestigious the school, the more unequal its student body is apt to be. And public institutions are not much better than private ones. As of 2004, 40 percent of first-year students at the most selective state campuses came from families with incomes of more than $100,000, up from 32 percent just five years earlier.

He goes on,

The major reason for the trend is clear. Not increasing tuition, though that is a factor, but the ever-growing cost of manufacturing children who are fit to compete in the college admissions game. The more hurdles there are, the more expensive it is to catapult your kid across them. Wealthy families start buying their children’s way into elite colleges almost from the moment they are born: music lessons, sports equipment, foreign travel (“enrichment” programs, to use the all-too-perfect term)—most important, of course, private-school tuition or the costs of living in a place with top-tier public schools.

He himself strikes me as a cloistered academic, with the typical prejudices of a professor. I do not endorse the article, apart from the quoted paragraphs.

11 thoughts on “Elite College Data Point

  1. Pink elephant in the room: kids inherit genes from their parents.

    The college sorting machine and assortative mating have increased during the same period.

    • +1

      Memo to the Prof. Both Love and Internationalism have unintended consequences.

      Students marrying someone most compatible and administrators increasing the pool of international students have moved the dial in all the direction the Prof finds undesirable.

      • The assumptions of inherited talent assume that the sorting of the last century is both complete and there are no sorted populations. I just don’t understand why this should be. It has been about three or maybe four generations since Americans of European extraction began to be sorted, you can barelyget a single trait in a bean lineage to breed true in that period with active and artificial selection and intelligence and drive are a heck of a lot more complicated than that. If you add non european immigrant populations especially from East Asia and Latin America you barely have a couple of generations of selection going on with lots of arbitrary factors.

        This is insane, even if this is heavily genetically predetermined, there has not been nearly enough time to sort this stuff out.

        And currently we are already restricting the sort of education necessary to climb, no matter how high one’s IQ is if you are working in a blue collar career even as a highly qualified tradesman you aren’t going to practicing the sort of selective mating of a Princeton grad. Yet if you grow up in a family of people like my great grandparents, who were basically clever peasant immigrants, and you are going to have a very hard time climbing in this new meritocratic world. Take a 140+ IQ kid and send him to LAUSD and you are very unlikely to get someone who will climb your greasy pole these days with every effort made to not help him. To shut down tracking etc..

        • “This is insane, even if this is heavily genetically predetermined, there has not been nearly enough time to sort this stuff out.”

          No one says it is 100% all sorted out and that people are ‘breeding true’ for talent. That is the extreme form of genetic determinism. But heritability is never perfect, gene expression depends on environmental factors (though in largely random and unpredictable ways), there is regression to the mean, and perfect mate-matching with one’s intellectual equivalent is not realistic.

          But those extreme positions are not what is being claimed.

          The thing we observe and are trying to explain is the correlation between the household income or wealth percentile of the household of one’s parents, and one’s chances of being granted admission to an elite college.

          The question is whether we can explain all that we observe without either invidious discrimination or a model in which money spend on educational enrichment fully accounts for outcome.

          In other words, if we have even a few generations of operation of merely moderate correlations between (1) Talent and Income, (2) Mean Talent of Parents and Mean Talent of Offspring, (3) Talent and Admission to Elite Colleges, and (4) Talent of Mother and Talent of Father, can we account for the distributional data about which William Deresiewicz complains?

          The answer is yes, even moderate mechanisms and correlations are sufficient to account for what we observe. In one grants that an individual’s better than average talents has, for several generations in the developed world, helped them to (1) Earn more money on average, (2) Have more talented kids on average, (3) Get in elite colleges more often than average, and (4) Marry a more talented person than average; then one can get what we see without making any of these relationships absolute or deterministic.

          The follow-up question is whether we need additional ‘socially unjust inequality’-based explanations that include either discrimination or strong causation from wealth to educational spending to talent to admissions. We don’t need those explanations, and furthermore, they are inconsistent with the data (e.g. fully 1 out of 6 elite entrants to the top 0.3% of elite colleges are from the bottom half of household income), as a I pointed out below.

          • But wouldn’t this also hold for England in 1850 and who was attending the ancient universities and who was at University College?
            Or. We could make the same correlation between wealth and inherited citizenship in a medieval city.

          • @Roy:

            What makes the last century different is universal public education, the widespread use of g-loaded and performance-predictive psychometric tests of intellectual talent (such as the SAT), and the conscious decision of elite schools such as Harvard to become meritocratic intellectual aristocracies and aggressively locate and recruit the best and brightest – especially in the post-WWII era.

            A lot of PSST factors also changed the nature of the economy and began to deliver increasing returns to talent and credentials in the form of status and income, while globalization, outsourcing, immigration, and automation decreased the payout for low-skill careers.

            Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but the revolution in social sexual attitudes and behavior patterns – to include birth control – is a major contributor to changes in the reproductive impact of mate-choice on the heritability of traits.

            Look, don’t take my word for it, just run a simple excel simulation of what happens over time if the moderate correlations I have described above are true for a few generations. You will see the disparities emerge spontaneously and eventually become a kind of bifurcation into rigid castes; this is precisely the phenomenon that Charles Murray says is happening now and which assertion he supported with plenty of eye-opening data in Coming Apart.

  2. The second quoted paragraph seems to accord with the rat-race competitiveness model in Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, but to be at odds with Bryan Caplan’s Selfish reasons to have more kids and the assertions he has claimed he will support in his upcoming work, The Case Against Education.

    So there is a real question of which is the causal cart and which is the horse in this correlation – the classic nature-nurture debate. The answer is somewhere in the middle, but the assumptions behind that paragraph fall far too close to the ‘uniform blank slates’ extreme.

    Let’s look at the numbers. The undergraduate enrollment of the US News top 10 big universities (Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, Duke, MIT, UPenn and Dartmouth) is 61,153. The US census says that the number of people in the four-year age cohort from 18-21 is 17,525,000.

    So we’re talking the top 0.35% for all these places combined. To get to even 1% I have to include everything in the top 25 including some very large public institutions like Berkeley and UCLA with admissions requirements that aren’t always applied with as much uniformity or consistency as the others.

    How many of these students come from families in the ‘top 1%’ (however you want to define that?) The “expensive enrichment spending is mostly what matters” theory would predict the vast majority of them, but that is definitely not the case. These are the most competitive schools, and the article itself admits that fully one out of six kids attending is not even from the top 50%, let alone the top 0.3% or top 1%.

    The counter-narrative is that most of the kids who are talented enough to be competitive for admission to these elite institutions inherited these rare talents from their talented parents, and that these talented parents tended to use their rare talents to earn slightly higher incomes than average, but with a high variance that causes the incomes to span from “slightly less than average” to “commanding heights”. After all, where do high incomes come from if not talent? And surely talent is inherited to a significant degree.

    There used to be lots of neglected talent in poorer fractions of the population, but the ‘centrifuges of society’ (to use London Mayor Boris Johnson’s term) have been gradually filtering them – identifying them and picking out the cream of the crop for upward mobility and assortative marriage.

  3. Some interesting facts for those who maintain that it is not rising tuition.

    When I commenced at the University of Texas at Austin in 1984. Tuition was 3 dollars a credit hour with about 200 in fees and 150 in books. Room and board was 2900 total. My freshman year ran about 3700 dollars. My son is looking at the University of Texas in 24 months and tuition and fees are 11,000 per year, books are one thousand, and room &board is seven to nine thousand. That’s 22 grand a year, worst case.

    In thirty two years the cost of UT Austin has risen from 3700 to 22000. If tuition had followed the ordinary inflation rate as is defined by the US CPI, the current cost should have risen to only about $8487.

    http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Calculators/Inflation_Rate_Calculator.asp

    • I had the same experience I went to UT 25 years ago and I could actually pay for half my education by delivering pizza badly, today that would be impossible.

    • BTW I had 2 uncles who went to Brown university but would not have had a prayer to get in. One of my sons is a good student but could not get into University of Florida (I live in Florida). I have been a high earner since about 2002 but my younger son is a plumber (he starts a night class in plumbing at the CC soon) so I am helping.

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