Notable selección de voces sobre las desigualdades que caracterizan al sistema de educación superior de los Estados Unidos de América y cómo éstas reproducen a las vez que multiplican las desigualdades que separan a los hogares en la base de la sociedad.
Has Higher Education Become an Engine of Inequality?

The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 2, 2012
http://chronicle.com/article/Has-Higher-Education-Become-an/132619/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Inequality is growing in the United States, and social mobility is slowing. A study by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 62 percent of Americans raised in the top one-fifth of the income scale stay in the top two-fifths; 65 percent born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths.
Education, long praised as the great equalizer, no longer seems to be performing as advertised. A study by Stanford University shows that the gap in standardized-test scores between low-income and high-income students has widened about 40 percent since the 1960s—now double that between black and white students. A study from the University of Michigan found that the disparity in college-completion rates between rich and poor students has grown by about 50 percent since the 1980s.
What role has higher education played in society’s stratification? Are colleges and universities contributing to economic inequality and the decline of social mobility?
The Chronicle asked a group of noted observers and researchers to respond.
Magnifying Social Inequality
Richard D. Kahlenberg
The Problem is Elsewhere
George Leef
Social Life and Social Inequality
Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth A. Armstrong
Fading Glory Days
Richard Wolin
The Great Sorting
Anthony P. Carnevale
The Role of Elite Institutions
William Julius Wilson
Growing Elitism
Thomas J. Espenshade
Equity and Community Colleges
Thomas R. Bailey
Renewing the Commitment
Sara Goldrick-Rab
Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.
The Chronicle of Higher Education1255 Twenty-Third St, N.W.Washington, D.C. 20037

July 2, 2012
Magnifying Social Inequality
By Richard D. Kahlenberg
http://chronicle.com/article/Magnifying-Social-Inequality/132627/
Higher-education officials are right when they inevitably point out that inequalities in student performance stem from socioeconomic inequities in society and the failure of our elementary and secondary schools to remedy them. Less acknowledged: Instead of counteracting the inequalities they inherit, colleges and universities magnify them.
Higher education in the United States is highly stratified, showering the most resources on the most-advantaged students. Low-income and minority students are concentrated in community colleges, which spent an average of $12,957 per full-time-equivalent student in 2009, while higher-income and white students are disproportionately educated at private four-year research institutions, which spent an average of $66,744 per student.
Our system of college admissions exacerbates inequalities. Colleges pride themselves on defending race-based affirmative-action programs, but their policies tend to benefit the most economically advantaged students of color. Most colleges do little to provide affirmative action for low-income students, despite rhetoric to the contrary. Research published by the Century Foundation has found that while affirmative action triples the percentage of black and Latino students compared with the share who would be admitted based on grades and test scores, the lower socioeconomic half of applicants receives no break in admissions. Meanwhile, legacy preferences for the children of alumni increase one’s chance of admissions by 45 percentage points, aiding an already highly privileged group.
Similarly, colleges have tilted away from economic need to merit aid. At the same time, the federal government gives tax breaks to wealthy students. Less than one-third of the American population has bachelor’s degrees—the rationale for using public money to support a fairly small group at the top is that we all benefit when more students are educated. The corollary is that we should focus aid on those students who would not attend and complete college but for public aid—a notion we’ve lost sight of when we subsidize those who would attend anyway.
Higher education could reduce inequality by eliminating tax breaks for non-needy students and increasing need-based aid; by providing better financing of community colleges and allowing them to offer bachelor’s degrees, which would attract more of an economic mix (something, new research suggests, that improves the performance of low-income students); and by employing class-based affirmative action and eliminating legacy preferences in elite-college admissions.
Timothy Noah’s new book, The Great Divergence, notes that in the United States today, “parentage is a greater determinant of a man’s future earnings than it is of his height and weight.” Steps such as the ones I’ve outlined would move us toward a fairer society in which children of short parents might still grow up to be short, but children of low-income parents would be less likely to end up poor adults.
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July 2, 2012
The Problem is Elsewhere
By George Leef
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Problem-is-Elsewhere/132629/
Higher education has only a little to do with the apparent decline in social mobility in the United States.
The main reason for the decline is that an array of federal, state, and local policies has increased the cost and difficulty for poorer people to improve themselves. Our national arteriosclerosis is a result of the growing burden of regulations that make it more difficult for poor people to start businesses on their own or find job openings with good career paths. Local business regulations, state licensing mandates, and federal minimum-wage and other rules have all made our economy more rigid than it once was, with a strongly disparate impact on the poor.
What role does higher education play in this? Only a minor one. Despite all the talk about how college education is supposed to add to a person’s human capital (sometimes it adds much, but often little or nothing), the educational level of the work force has nothing to do with the kinds of jobs created in the economy. No matter how high “educational attainment” reaches in our society, there will always be a great many jobs that do not require any advanced academic study or training—and won’t pay any better just because the worker has gone to college.
Because we have done so much to promote college, however, we now have the unintended consequence of credential inflation. That is to say, a large and increasing proportion of jobs are now open only to people who have college credentials. Even though the work required is seldom beyond the capability of a person who has not earned a degree, or even taken a single college course, many employers now screen out workers who don’t have a degree. As a result, many good career paths that were formerly open to people who haven’t gone to college are now foreclosed to them.
That has the strongest impact on the poor. They have the most difficulty affording the cost of college in money and time. They are also the most apt to struggle with academic work. Credential inflation, unfortunately, confines them to the shrinking segment of the labor market in which educational credentials still are not important, thereby reducing their range of options (already limited by government regulations, as mentioned above).
Developments in online education, independent certification of competencies, e-portfolios, and the like may soon help redress this severe socioeconomic problem. Then people will be evaluated on the basis of their actual knowledge and skills and not on their paper credentials.
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July 2, 2012
Social Life and Social Inequality
By Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth Armstrong
http://chronicle.com/article/Social-LifeSocial/132631/
Declining state support and rising tuition do more than reduce access to public higher education for many low-income students. The trends also lure colleges into catering to the social and educational needs of affluent, full-freight students at the expense of others. In doing so, they create a social atmosphere that has a profound effect on mobility.
In a forthcoming book, we report on a five-year study of college life, based on interviews at a midtier public research university in the Midwest. We followed a cohort of women who started there and lived on the same dormitory floor through their entrance into the work force. Similar except for class background, they left college with vastly different life prospects. Time spent at the university had done little to diminish existing differences. Few of the women from less privileged backgrounds realized their dreams of upward mobility, while most of those from privileged backgrounds were poised to reproduce their parents’ affluence. While our in-depth data is on women, we do not expect that the situation will be different for men.
The women’s outcomes were, in large part, a result of the structure of academic and social life on the campus. We identified three pathways through the university, each associated with the agenda of a different group of students. The party pathway accommodated the interests of socially oriented and out-of-state students—the segment of the affluent for which the university was best poised to compete by offering a fun “college experience.” At the heart of the party pathway was a powerful Greek system, a residence-hall system that fed students into the party scene, and numerous “easy” majors. As the most visible and well-resourced route through the institution, the party pathway was impossible to avoid—even by those who wished to. It was a constant reminder to those who couldn’t afford or didn’t wish to join of their place in the university.
The professional pathway, which moved academic achievers into professional jobs, required early and active intervention by involved, educated parents, often putting it out of reach of less-affluent women. The mobility pathway, through which many of those less-privileged students sought access to the middle class, was so poorly supported by the university that those women who transferred to less-prestigious regional campuses ended up with better long-term prospects in the labor market than similar women who did not transfer.
This university is not unique. Four-year residential campuses have seen increases in spending for student services, including recreation and athletics, that far surpass those for academic instruction and financial aid. Some observers call it the “country-clubization of the American university.” At midtier public universities, that means structuring academics around student social life. However, as Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, has noted, the proportion of the population seeking “a full-service institution with all the bells and whistles” is already in the minority.
Our study provides evidence of a large (and likely to grow) mismatch between what many four-year institutions provide and what most Americans seeking higher education need. By catering to the affluent minority, public universities are ceasing to serve as vehicles for economic mobility and instead reproducing social inequalities.
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July 2, 2012
Fading Glory Days
By Richard Wolin
http://chronicle.com/article/Fading-Glory-Days/132633/
Since the 1980s, the golden age of American higher education has been steadily fading.
In the postwar years, the GI Bill and the community-college system created opportunities for those lacking in background or resources (in many cases, both) to work their way up the educational and professional ladder. During the same period, grass-roots social movements—above all the civil-rights movement and feminism—compelled elite four-year colleges, which spend up to 10 times as much per student as public universities do, to open their doors to students whose class background or race had previously been grounds for exclusion.
Since the 1980s, however, that situation has begun to reverse itself. Under the constraints of the antitax revolt, dwindling public revenues, and, more recently, the 2008 financial crisis, we have witnessed a major withdrawal of funds from public education, whose burdensome costs must increasingly be borne by private citizens. When coupled with the burgeoning sticker price of college tuition—since 1986 tuition costs have risen by 500 percent, over four times the rate of inflation—the result is that a baccalaureate degree has increasingly become the prerogative of the most affluent Americans. Statistics show that whereas children of a family earning $90,000 or more per year stand a 50-percent chance of earning a B.A. by the age of 24, when household income drops to the $60,000-$90,000 range, the odds fall by half, to one in four. Should family income fall below $35,000, those odds plummet to one in 17.
To offset rising tuition costs, lower- and middle-income students now graduate with mammoth student-loan debts. Today the average student graduates with a daunting $23,000 in unforgivable loan debt.
The socioeconomic consequences of these trends are unambiguous and disturbing. The wave of merit-based, upward social mobility that crested during the 1960s and 70s has all but come to an end. During that period, colleges functioned as crucial mechanisms of democratization and social inclusion. Today they are repositioning themselves as bastions of class privilege and social exclusion. As tax revenues dwindle and endowments shrink, the social-egalitarian ideal of need-blind admissions has also faded. Thus college-admissions committees seek out students who can pay full tuition, allowing their qualified, penurious counterparts to fend for themselves. Public universities, for their part, are shirking their responsibilities as state-financed, land-grant institutions by increasingly opening their doors to prosperous out-of-state students, who can afford to pay much higher tuition rates.
A series of recent reports from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development places the United States last in terms of gains in college-participation rates, which measure higher education’s role in facilitating upward social mobility. In these surveys, Western European nations fare much better, since, unlike in the United States, European higher education is uniformly and generously publicly subsidized.
American society is becoming increasingly polarized: a nation of haves and have-nots. What is new is that, because of an increase in occupational stratification and social cleavage, today’s have-nots possess little in common. The decline of the manufacturing sector and the concomitant rise of post-Fordism and the service industry mean that class solidarity has precipitously decayed, allowing plutocratic elites, in conjunction with the financial sector, to attain a heretofore unprecedented level of political-economic dominance.
In sum: The 1 percent formulates the economic règles de jeu that everyone else must live by. Increasingly, those elites are politically accountable to no one but themselves. We may still live in a democracy, but increasingly, it is a democracy in name only.
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July 2, 2012
The Great Sorting
By Anthony P. Carnevale
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Great-Sorting/132635/
College education is becoming a passive participant in the reproduction of economic privilege. Taken one at time, postsecondary institutions are fountains of opportunity; taken together, they are a highly stratified bastion of privilege.
Of course, sorting by race, class, and sex begins long before college-admissions officers get involved. And almost a third of Americans don’t even go to college, while 36 million in the work force have gone to college but not earned degrees. But sorting continues in terms of what kind of college you attend, whether you graduate, how much farther you go, and (an important factor often overlooked) what you major in—all decisions that make a difference to later earnings, and that reflect highly segregated social and economic patterns.
The patterns are reinforced as an unintended consequence of the business model of higher education: Competition among institutions is based on prestige, relentlessly matching the most-advantaged students with the most-selective institutions, while the rest are stratified in a finely grained hierarchy of separate and unequal tiers of four-year and two-year institutions.
Therefore, as enrollments in higher education increase, individual students are better off, in that more of them have access to some form of education. But inequality among students as a whole spreads.
Institutional competition simultaneously increases postsecondary quality and inequality. Happily, the number of selective and highly selective colleges in Barron’s Guide to the Most Competitive Colleges has grown by more than 30 percent since the 1990s. Unhappily, the share of students from the bottom income quartile at the 200 selective colleges has stalled at less than 5 percent. And white flight has long since moved on from the leafy green suburbs to the nation’s selective college campuses, leaving the overcrowded and underfinanced community colleges to blacks, Hispanics, and lower-income students.Postsecondary stratification matters. The most-selective institutions spend more per student, have better graduation rates, and offer better access to jobs or graduate and professional schools than less-selective institutions do. Where you go and what you take determines what you make. And more than dollars and cents, the current dynamic of selectivity separates learning that transforms lives from job training.
On the surface, the great sorting seems impartial. After all, we each have to do our own homework to make the grades and ace the tests that give us access to the most-selective colleges and the best jobs.
Fair enough? Not entirely. In a society where people start out unequal, the test-based metrics that govern college admissions become a dodge—a way of laundering the money that comes with being born into the right bank account or the right race or ethnicity.
Maybe the more affluent kids are just born smarter? Not so. For most low-income kids, there is no relationship between their innate abilities measured in childhood and their aptitudes developed in time for college. Conversely, the best predictor of the developed aptitudes of adolescents from affluent families is their innate abilities when they were children.
Unintended or not, postsecondary stratification presents a nagging moral hazard: a barrier to upward mobility that is inimical to our American democratic ethos and our claim to worthiness in the global contest of cultures.
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July 2, 2012
The Role of Elite Institutions
By William Julius Wilson
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Role-of-Elite-Institutions/132639/
The increase in the college premium­—the differential in what is earned by college graduates compared with what is earned by those with high-school diplomas—is a major factor contributing to rising inequality in America. A widely cited study by the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz,
The Race Between Education and Technology, reveals a sharp increase in the salaries of individuals with college diplomas and advanced degrees, because of the need for better-educated workers in our increasingly complex economy. According to Goldin and Katz, the college premium accounted for roughly 60 percent of the growth in wage inequality from 1973 to 2005.
And the increasing demand for educated workers has led to tuition increases, especially since the 1980s.
Whereas tuition at public and private universities averaged, respectively, 4 percent and 20 percent of annual median family income from the 1950s to 1970s, by 2005 the comparable figures had surged to 10 percent and 45 percent of median family income. Thus, unlike in earlier years, increases in college tuition have placed a severe financial strain on the budgets of middle- and lower-income families. Indeed, many Americans have to forgo any prospect of sending their children to college, because the costs are so far beyond their means. For others, as Timothy Noah put it in his impressive new book,
The Great Divergence, “a college education is so inarguably necessary to thrive in today’s economy that parents will pay whatever they can scrape together, even if it means dipping into retirement funds. Financial and student loans make up the difference for many families, and others pay sticker price.”
Universities and colleges realize that, Noah argues, and therefore experience few constraints in raising tuition levels. He quotes a dean at Mount Holyoke College saying colleges raise tuition to attract students who equate cost with prestige. The dean called it “the Chivas Regal strategy.”
The net result is that elite institutions now feature a disproportionate number of students from affluent backgrounds. Recognizing the problem, Harvard University, where I teach, has instituted a scholarship program that provides virtually free tuition for students from middle- and lower-income families in the United States. Other rich elite universities, like Princeton and Yale, have followed suit.
Nonetheless, the number of low-income students in the nation’s colleges and universities remains distressingly low. In many institutions, enrollments of lower-income students have actually declined. In 2003 more entering freshmen at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor came from families earning at least $200,000 than were from the entire bottom half of the income distribution. And a study by Anthony Carnevale revealed that while 67 percent of the entering freshmen in the class of 2010 at the 193 most selective colleges came from the top fourth of the earnings distribution, only 15 percent came from the bottom half of the distribution.
It is obvious that more steps have to be taken to attract low-income students. Institutions of higher learning may not be able to directly influence preparatory programs to enter college, but they can focus on creative ways of recruiting lower-income students—and, given the continuing tuition hikes, on more-comprehensive need-based scholarships and aid packages.
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July 2, 2012
Growing Elitism
By Thomas J. Espenshade
http://chronicle.com/article/Growing-Elitism/132641/
On balance, elite higher educaron helps maintain social inequality in America, and the economic recession is magnifying that problem, especially at public institutions.
During the past two decades, research that Alexandria Walton Radford and I conducted found that a rising proportion of students who are enrolled at selective colleges and universities has come from the top two social-class categories: upper-middle- and upper-class families. And at the private institutions we studied, there is a pronounced upward slope to the relationship between the probability of being admitted and the socioeconomic status of one’s family.
When one considers the positive economic rate of return of a college education—and especially of a degree from a name-brand institution—it is easy to see how selective private higher education confers, concentrates, and consolidates privilege for students who have grown up in well-to-do circumstances.
How that happens is illuminated by following a cohort of students through the process from college application to admission, matriculation, and graduation. More than half of all applicants to selective colleges come from upper-middle- or upper-class families. By the time of graduation, the proportion has risen to 60 percent.
This is not to say that American higher education is not an engine of social mobility; it is for some students. On an other-things-being-equal basis, selective private institutions give a pronounced boost in the admission process to nonwhite students from lower- and working-class family backgrounds. For white applicants, however, the correlation between admission probability and parental socioeconomic status resembles an upside-down cereal bowl: It is highest for middle- and upper-middle-class students, lower for upper-class students, and lowest for lower- and working-class students.
A number of steps could be taken to increase socioeconomic diversity and ease the endless recycling of privilege. Though it would be financially challenging, it would help if colleges could practice “socioeconomic neutrality” and not favor the most well-to-do candidates in the process that admits, enrolls, and graduates students. Need-blind admissions and policies promising grants rather than loans would be a useful start. In addition, widening the applicant pool to include more lower-income students would go a long way toward reversing current trends. First, recruitment should receive as much time and attention as admissions. Second, relevant parts of colleges’ Web pages for admissions and financial aid should be translated into Spanish and perhaps other languages. And third, it would help to conduct focus groups on campus with students from modest economic backgrounds, to hear their stories about how they got “from there to here.”
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July 2, 2012
Equity and Community Colleges
By Thomas R. Bailey
http://chronicle.com/article/EquityCommunity-Colleges/132643/
Access to high-quality education is unequal from earliest schooling, and over time, those inequalities build on themselves. Community colleges have contributed to this problem, but they are also essential to the solution.
Regardless of previous academic achievement, low-income students are much more likely than higher-income students to attend community colleges than four-year institutions. And students who start in community colleges do not, on average, progress as far as those starting in four-year institutions; they are certainly less likely to complete a B.A. Thus, by starting at a community college, they may fall further behind more-advantaged students.
Research suggests that many low-income students are “underplaced”: They have the academic skills to gain admission to more-selective colleges than the ones they attend. Better counseling and financial-aid programs might improve equity by displacing some higher-income students from four-year colleges. But it is hard to believe that such efforts would make a perceptible dent in the current extent of inequality.
Eliminating community colleges, or encouraging every student to enroll in a four-year institution, won’t work unless four-year institutions are willing to take the students who now attend community colleges. But selective institutions are not about to open their doors to all comers. For the most part, they have used the growing demand for higher education to become even more selective rather than to expand enrollment.
The availability of low-cost, local, open-access community colleges is therefore crucial. As tuition at four-year institutions rises, and college degrees become a prerequisite for jobs paying a living wage, community colleges fill an ever more crucial role in our economy. Accordingly, their enrollments have steadily grown.
But fewer than two-fifths of students who start in community colleges go on to complete a degree or certificate within six years. Community colleges must find a way to increase completion rates without restricting access.
Can that be done? There is reason for optimism. The past decade has seen a growing volume of research, and reform, devoted to that issue. Perhaps the most important conclusion is that reforms must be ambitious and concerned with the entire student experience at college, including opportunities to transfer to four-year colleges. Reforms that focus on only one stage, such as remediation or counseling for course selection, will have, at best, only modest effects.
Right now, millions of students are enrolled in community colleges. Improving community-college performance will have a direct, positive impact on their lives and future opportunities. With enough improvement, community colleges may even become an attractive alternative for upper-income students.
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July 2, 2012
Renewing the Commitment
By Sara Goldrick-Rab
http://chronicle.com/article/Renewing-the-Commitment/132645/
In 1947 the historic Truman Commission called for national investments in higher education to promote democracy by enabling all people to earn college degrees. Subsequent expansion of community colleges, adult education, and federal aid occurred not in the name of economic stimulation but to reduce inequality and further active citizenship.
Those ambitions have been steadily corrupted. Today the Tea Party casts the college-educated as snobbish and fundamentally disconnected. Many four-year colleges and universities reinforce that perception by focusing on rankings and alumni satisfaction rather than affordability and national service. Educators speak about business objectives, maximizing revenue through models that charge high tuition and give high aid to needy students, and using a meritocracy narrative that denies the strong role played by a family’s ability to pay. The results are stark: Among high-achieving students, just 44 percent of those whose families are in the bottom 25 percent of annual income attend college, compared with 80 percent of those whose families are in the top 25 percent.
In this new world, market-based solutions increase inequality by design. As David F. Labaree documented in
Someone Has to Fail, credentialing has replaced learning, and as a result, many students are derided for being what the authors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa dismiss as Academically Adrift.
The current model ensures that private returns in the form of high-paying jobs accrue only to some, and it justifies minimal public investment in education.
Corporations act as gatekeepers, insisting that only degrees from elite colleges matter, while refusing to pay higher taxes to adequately support public higher education. It is to their advantage: They benefit financially from the for-profit colleges that are filling a void they helped create. The reality is cruel: Many families now dream the same college dream families always have, but run in place in their efforts to achieve it. Heavy debt even drags some backwards.
Colleges and universities vigorously participate in this process. As they lose state support, public flagships turn inward rather than to their communities, focusing on the self-preservation and pursuit of prestige that led them astray. Private universities help their public counterparts fail by promoting idealistic standards of “quality” and practices (such as offering grants rather than loans) that the public institutions simply can’t afford. Too many leaders of public universities make common cause with elite private colleges rather than with their public brethren.
Underneath it all resides a fear-driven backlash against educational and economic opportunities for people of color and the working class. Since the civil-rights movement, and especially during President Ronald Reagan’s tenure, a focus on private rights and personal responsibilities has replaced concern for social welfare. Remarkably, Reagan convinced the nation that individuals should pay to achieve the American dream. No president since has managed to combat that narrative. In today’s focus on paying for performance and metrics, we hear echoes of President Bill Clinton’s efforts to reform welfare by telling poor mothers to work for it.
Such rhetoric is fundamentally un-American. As John Dewey reminded us, sustaining democracy requires that we collectively provide for all children what we want for our own children. Anything else simply isn’t fair. The politics of austerity have resulted in a paucity of active citizens pursuing democratic ideals by maintaining and expanding public investments. In that climate, New York State stands out for bucking the trend and promoting public higher education with limited reliance on tuition. So, too, do the university presidents urging President Obama to put into effect maintenance-of-effort requirements—requiring states to finance public colleges at a minimum level—to renew the social compact on which our great higher-education system was built. They are bravely rejecting the claim that private markets hold the key to great public needs. In doing so, those leaders may help bring the country back together.