Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus’s new book, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids – And What We Can Do About It, has been receiving a great deal of attention, from the pages of The New York Times and Wall Street Journal to the Colbert Report. As I noted in a recent review of the book in The New Republic, Hacker, a Queens College professor and Dreifus, a New York Times writer, seem to have hit a nerve because they’ve tapped into today’s strong populist sentiment about elites.
Some of this populism is fully warranted. The authors are right to question the ways in which selective institutions cater to the wealthy. At Duke, Yale, Stanford, and Brown, for example, more than half of students come from very wealthy families who can afford to pay the full $200,000 in tuition, room, and board required for a B.A. degree—a cost that is out of reach to the vast majority of American families. As the authors note, too many colleges and universities look and act like country clubs rather than institutions of higher learning.
But there is also a faux populism that creeps into the book, when Hacker and Dreifus suggest that what they call the “Golden Dozen”—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Penn, Stanford, Duke, Amherst, and Williams—offer an education that is in some ways worse than at institutions such as Raritan Valley Community College, Western Oregon University, and Evergreen State College. Ivy League grads can be an unimpressive group, they note, pointing out that only 26 of 934 living individuals who entered the Princeton Class of ‘73 make Who’s Who in America. The authors recommend that budget-conscious students begin at community college and then transfer to four-year institutions.
I argued in the New Republic review that on average, students are better off at more selective institutions, because research suggests that a given student is more likely to graduate, will have greater resources devoted to her education, will receive a greater subsidy on her tuition bills, will have higher earnings, and will have a greater chance of joining the leadership class. I was particularly skeptical of the community college transfer option, noting that only 10 percent of students who begin community college eventually earn a B.A. degree.
In an e-mail to me, Professor Hacker responded, “We found very good freshman-sophomore liberal arts programs hidden away in community colleges, from New Jersey and Florida out to Oregon. Classes are small, professors are available and care, and they have formalized arrangements with four-year schools which welcome you as a junior. This path is both possible and responsible.”
On the question of joining the leadership class, Hacker wrote, “Of course, person for person, more Yale graduates become CEOs than from the University of Missouri. Our argument re Princetonians was that given all the resources lavished on them, too many end very average. Indeed, most regress to the mean, while some Missouri types pass them on the ladder.” (Hacker gave me permission to quote from his e-mail.)
Of course, Hacker is right that it is possible to join the leadership class from the University or Missouri or to transfer from community college to four-year institutions, and in recent years, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation has done a great deal to facilitate the latter transition. But is it good advice in the aggregate to start off at a community college or to choose a less selective college than one is capable of being admitted to? On average, the answer is no. Research from William Bowen and colleagues on the one hand, and Anthony Canevale and Jeff Strohl on the other, suggests that it is a mistake to “undermatch”—that is, to attend a less selective college than one can get into. Whether because of peer influence or the financial resources available, more selective institutions offer substantial advantages, including higher graduation rates for comparably qualified students.
In the end, Hacker and Dreifus’s faux populism collides with their legitimate populist critique of higher education. If it doesn’t much matter to one’s life chances whether one attends a more or less selective college, why should we even care that wealthy students dominate at the elites?
7 Responses to Faux Populism in Higher Education?
11242283 - September 10, 2010 at 6:59 am
Faux populism it may be — and Hacker & Dreyfuss do underestimate the difficulties in navigating the transfer function from cc to 4-yr university (particularly for minorities) — but rather than us all cutting each others’ throats and continuing to produce an overworked, drone high school experience of young people trying to fit the profile to get into an elite college, maybe we could focus more in our society in improving the experience of students at less elite places. The “golden dozen” we will always have with us, I guess, but their influence to outsized and the ways in which their values are highlighted and valorized in our culture is reductive and ultimately dangerous to democracy. Rather than having young people all scramble to get into one of a dozen lifeboats that make affluence a bit more certain, why not look at really democratizing education. Of course, the leadership elite will never really allow that. Most of what the current right wing populist revolt (tea party, et al) are about is repellant, but they do cynically tap into what a think is real and justified resentment at the degree to which our leadership elites (of both left and right) have circled the wagons around their own positions and wealth. Encouraging young people to do everything they can to become part of this elite might be good advice (perhaps) at the individual level, but it is corrosive to our democracy. And BTW, I also think much of Hacker and Dreyfuss’ book is a crock.
frankgado - September 10, 2010 at 8:57 am
Obviously, the more selective a college, the more promising a class it selects (except for the gifted athletes that ALL colleges seem to hunger for–including the Ivies). We also have to recognize that whom you sleep and drink with affects distribution on the income and influence ladder.What worries me (and Hacker and Dreifus) is the quality of education that the high tuition charges buy. More than a quarter of the teaching faculty at most elite schools consists of graduate students and adjuncts. Even more harmful to education is that the prestige and economic well-being of the faculty member is won through publication and the quest for grants–and that is NOT the ebst gauge for the quality of tewaching.Read the mission statements and the propaganda sent out by almost all colleges and you see the spotlight placed on teaching students how to think.I spent 35 years in the academic profession, and I never once attended a meeting devoted to the question of how one teaches students how to think. Of course, the energy expended on teaching what to think is more than abundant.Our system of higher education is highly wasteful and generally ineffective. Developing the quality of mind on campuses is a concept shiovering in terra incognita.
dank48 - September 10, 2010 at 10:53 am
Mr. Kahlenberg seems to me to be taking the position of the professional gambler who was taking a break from the poker game and was told confidentially by another player that some of the other players had conspired to cheat. “I know,” he said. Then why on earth play? “It’s the only game in town.”The amazing thing is how scrupulously we avoid facing reality. The notion that graduation from a “golden dozen” school is cause and material success is result is a hoot. To graduate one must, inter alia, be admitted. Of course, since “golden dozen” admission is totally based on academic ability and since family, finances, and friends have nothing to do with it at all, . . . The astounding fact about the United States is that we continue to give lip service to the “all men are created equal” before the law ideal, even though we know perfectly well that all men do not stay equal for one nanosecond postpartum. We have a class system; what a shocker. We have a myth that one can move upward through the strata of society based on ability alone.What’s really interesting is how our political, press, professoriate establishment keeps on pumping out this bilge, for all the world as if people were still swallowing it. We are not, heaven knows, a race of geniuses, but the cheat has become so obvious that it’s just too hard to fall for it, dumb as we may be. The problem with aristocracy is laziness. The “golden dozen” are harder to get into than to get through. Well-connected but ill-educated golden boys (and a few girls) have managed to ruin this country’s economy, sabotage the political process, rob the treasury blind, and generally screw things up beyond all recognition. Hubris, an old but by no means outmoded concept, has done its job again. The arrogant, entitled (all but literally), self-selected “superior” elite has, like every other elite in history, finally reached the limits of its competence and, of course, just kept on going, like the Gadarene swine.It’s just impossible to ignore the fact that our masters are morons.
andrewhacker - September 10, 2010 at 1:37 pm
We have another reason for suggesting low cost/low prestige options like community colleges or the honors programs within the public universities–an alternative we strongly recommend. We believe that the discounts offered by the elite colleges in the guise of student aid are still not enough to keep many students free of debt. And, we think that beginning one’s work life clear and free should be a prime goal of students and parents when selecting a college. The freedom, the open options, may be worth far more than the brand name label.Here’s a story that we didn’t use in the book. A medical assistant at a Manhattan physician we visit attended NYU on what she believed was a full scholarship. She is African-American and wants to be a physician. Her other option was SUNY and her parents pushed her to NYU because “it’s private.” Well, she had miserable science courses, sometimes with college juniors as teaching assistants and she graduated with $70,000 in unexpected debt. “I wish I’d gone to Binghamton, like my friends from high school. They’re in medical school now,” she told us.I wish this story was unusual. And I realize that NYU isn’t Ivy, but the myth that private is always better is part of what we’re trying to counter. And we’ve heard variants of it all over the country. I wish she’d gone to Binghamton, too.We say, be creative. Look for other options. There are great teachers and possibilities in surprising places. But job one: avoid debt.Claudia Dreifus
susanekg1 - September 10, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Kahlenberg’s individualist perspective blinds him re what allowed elite universities to grow so fantastically rich: their tax-free status as educational institutions. Harvard’s astronomical endowment, which just jumped 11%, grew to its present level thanks in large part to its exemption from taxes that it would have paid if the citizens who pay for public education had not granted private educational institutions this enormous advantage.The gaping divide between public and private universities is painfully apparent here in Massachusetts, where UMass ranks 49th in terms of state funding for higher ed. Clearly, the most reasonable way to put a dent in this unfairness, and to bring the notion of equal opportunity a few fractions closer to reality, is to impose a small tax, say 2%, on all educational endowments over a billion dollars, and to earmark the revenues for public education.Unfortunately, too many legislators dismiss this idea because they’ve fallen for the notion that competition among students with vastly unequal life chances somehow results in meritocracy. Obviously, it’s no wonder that the people who occupy the top of the heap can’t see this inequity. At Harvard, Yale, and their ilk, the prevailing conviction seems to be, “Of course the system is fair; otherwise, we wouldn’t be where we are!”
kudera - September 14, 2010 at 11:31 am
I agree with Claudia Dreifus’s last words above, “But job one: avoid debt,” but of course, for students in 2010 this is much easier said than done (unless one has wealthy parents, extraordinary athletic ability, or another amazing talent). I’m guessing (or hoping) that Dreifus and Hacker acknowledge in their book that the elite colleges (and there are more than 12–Swathmore, Rice, Cal Tech, etc.) are the schools that have much more financial aid to offer their students (larger endowments, etc.).But like Dreifus’s NYU example above, I have met graduates of Georgia Tech and the University of Pennsylvania who are in their 30s and still carrying over $100,000 in student loans. AndI suspect that even at the interesting, less well-known schools they “discover” in the book there are still many students with heavy debts they cannot avoid.As far as I can tell, we need more national direction on making college more genuinely affordable to all, and I suspect Hacker and Dreifus would agree.Best,Alex Kudera
jesor - September 14, 2010 at 12:34 pm
Hmmm….So the argument is “if you admit a smaller range of students who have had advantages in life (i.e. tutors, SAT coaches, good high schools, etc.) that don’t have to worry about working for their education and can devote all of their time to studying, and compare their success rates to students from a much more varied background, and you find that the better off students are more successful at your instituiton, you must therefore be providing a higher quality of education at the elite instituion”. This is the same old selectivity = quality hypothesis that has been discounted in so many studies. The problem is that its now become a dangerous argument since faculties and institutions find it to be cheaper and easier to improve selectivity rather than instructional quality, and consequence is that selectivity is now being used as a way to protect poor instruction and poor decisions about who actually teaches at colleges and universities. The end result is that we end up with students and a society that are less well educated and fail to utilize the critical thinking skills that they should have honed while in college. The evidence for it is in our business and political sectors were mediocrity is arguably the norm.