Disucussion for September 15 session - click "Edit" to add your notes/questions, then "Save":
Ross Douthat, "Does Meritocracy Work?"
- Half of the offspring of families with incomes of $90K or above graduate from college; for the income range $35K-61K, the percentage is a little better than one in ten, and it is only one in 17 for families making less than $35K. What does this tell us about "meritocracy"?
- Why is access getting more unequal over time? For example:
- "the share {of Pell Grant recipients} attending four-year colleges fell from 62 percent in 1974 to 45 percent in 2002"
- "In the second half of the 1990s.. families with incomes below $40,000 received less than seventy cents for every dollar increase in private college tuition. All other families, including the richest, received more than a dollar in aid for ever dollar increase in tuition."
- How does Stanford do in admitting poorer students?
- Why hasn't class-based affirmative action been implemented?
- "..economist Richard Vedder has suggested that states might consider offering less money to schools and more to students, in the form of tuition vouchers redeemable at any public institution in their home state." - Would this work? Why would states do this?
Tia O'Brian, "Ivy League or Bust"
- Should universities create their own ranking system?
- How do college admissions and access trends reflect what is happening in the rest of society?
Daniel Golden, "How Lowering the Bar Helps Colleges Prosper"
- Is the ability of celebrity and wealthy children to get into high-status colleges even when they are underqualified a major or a minor problem?
Tom's Questions
- In "Does Meritocracy Work?", Douthat provides statistics showing a strong correlation between college graduation rates and parental socioeconomic status. He seems to take this as evidence that our society is not a meritocracy. But Herrnstein's much-discussed 1971 article on IQ drew exactly the opposite conclusion from similar statistics. Herrnstein argued that the strong correlation of income with IQ showed that America was a meritocracy -- that is, a society in which the most talented are the most successful. He attributed the fact that economic success is strongly associated with parental wealth to the heritability of IQ. Assuming that IQ also correlates strongly with success in college, an advocate of Herrnstein's position might argue that the numbers Douthat cites show that colleges are accepting and educating just the right people -- that is, the most intelligent young people in the society. What additional kinds of data would one need to look at to try to choose between this conclusion and Douthat's?
- Tia O'Brian in recognizes in "Ivy League or Bust" that the admissions frenzy she describes involves only 100 or so colleges, out of a total of about 3000 in the US. Since it's possible to get an excellent education at many more than the top 100, why don't more high school students opt out of the competition and go to one of the less competitive schools? And given that this option exists, is the problem described in the article serious enough to warrant much concern?
- Are the presidents of Amherst, Reed, Bates, Colby, Swarthmore, Grinnell, Pitzer, Williams and Barnard in a position to change the situation described in "Ivy League or Bust"? Wouldn't it take the presidents of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, etc. to really change things?
Sonja's question** From "Ivy League or Bust": "Laird, the retired UC Berkeley admissions director, calls for an end to rankings. 'If a significant number of institutions withhold information, then they become irrelevant.'" It seems that unified action by universities could resolve or at least address issues like corporate funding of research and the skewed admissions process. Yet with concerns about anti-trust laws and alumni funding, universities may find such collaboration difficult or unfeasible. Could (and should) the federal government step in and play a regulatory role? What might be the advantages, disadvantages and/or pitfalls of increased government regulation of university policies?
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