The Coin of the Realm

David Leonhardt turns in an unsatisfactory cover story in the Times Education Life supplement today about recent high-profile moves by elite universities to offer more generous financial aid to low- and middle-income students. Its starts with a dramatic moment in 2003, set in one of higher education's iconic spaces, the Thomas Jefferson-designed Rotunda of the University of Virginia. Just as a high-level meeting is about to start, the UVA President Casteen is handed a note from the press office: the University of North Carolina has just announced a new aid program for low-income students:

The program touched a nerve with Mr. Casteen. The son of a shipyard worker from Portsmouth, in the southeastern corner of the state, he was the first member of his family to attend college. But during his 13 years as president, tuition had risen significantly, as it had at many colleges, and the Virginia campus had become even more dominated by upper-middle-class students. North Carolina’s new policy, which had the potential to lure students away from Virginia, could aggravate the situation.

Before the meeting had ended, Mr. Casteen announced to the room that he wanted the financial-aid staff to come up with a response. He wanted it quickly, he said, and he wanted something bigger than what North Carolina was doing. Four months later, at the board’s next meeting, it approved a plan that was similar but somewhat more generous than North Carolina’s. Making sure everyone had a chance to attend college, Mr. Casteen would say, was “a fundamental obligation of a free culture.”

The article goes on to describe similar announcements in subsequent years from the likes of Harvard, Yale and others, chronicling an escalating oneupsmanship of generosity. 

The problem with this narrative is the implication that the socioeconomic makeup of a given college is primarily a function of who chooses to apply to go there. It's not. It's a function of who the college chooses to let in.  This is not to say that these programs aren't a step in the right direction, in and of themselves--they are. And all else being equal, they've probably had some effect on increasing the economic diversity of the applicant pool -- although it would be nice to see some hard numbers to back this up.

But increasing aid to needy students amounts to elite colleges spending a small amount of what is, for them, an abundant resource--money. The real scarce coin of the realm in elite higher education is admissions. According to Institute for College Access and Success, only seven percent of UVA students received need-based Pell grants in 2005-2006, two years after that fateful day in the rotunda. That's the lowest rate for any public university in America. If President Casteen announces that UVA will no longer provide admissions preferences to legacies, the children of rich people, or recruited athletes in upper-income sports like crew and polo, and will fill those slots with first-generation and low-income students, then I'll start to believe UVA is taking it's "fundamental obligation" seriously. 

The funny thing is, Leonhardt obviously understands this, since the back half of the article is filled with caveats about why, for the aforementioned and other reasons, this whole story isn't such a big deal after all. You see this sometimes, when someone sets out to write a story with a particular thesis, reports the issue thoroughly and represents the opposing point view fairly, but can't quite come to grips with the fact that maybe the thesis should have actually been something else. 

There's also this odd justification for recent policies at Harvard and elsewhere extending aid to the upper middle-class:

Expanding the pool of aid recipients may also make the policies more popular among students. It would be rather counterproductive if the children of midlevel corporate executives, who were paying $50,000 in tuition and fees, ended up resenting the children of police officers, who were paying nothing.

Is that what we're worried about now? Not enflaming class resentment among the children of corporate executives? That doesn't say much for the influence of an elite college education, does it?