A reading guide for understanding who gets in — and why.
Higher education in the United States has become an increasingly controversial topic, with complex debates about who deserves the privilege to attend our most prestigious institutions — not to mention how much they should pay to do so, and how to navigate the long tail of debt that can follow for those who do make the cut.
Feeling a little overwhelmed by all the back-and-forth about the American college experience? Never fear — we’ve got an introductory course on where these conversations stand now. (And just like in actual college, you can totally wear your PJs to class, if you’re so inclined.)
First things first: What happened with affirmative action?
One of the most closely watched cases during the Supreme Court’s most recent term was the question of whether colleges can legally consider race as part of their admissions process. Before the decision came down, we took a deep dive into the history of affirmative action at universities, which revealed the way these policies had been transformed in the years since their creation, effectively watering down both their purpose and their execution.
The court ruled that Harvard College policies which did consider race during admissions were in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which meant that universities across the country would have to drop similar programs.
READ ON: Get an in-depth overview of this monumental Supreme Court ruling right here, where you can review the oral arguments in the case and read the court’s opinion (as well as the dissents) in full.
What about legacy admissions?
As soon as that SCOTUS ruling dropped, many commentators argued that the case had effectively struck down these kind of preferred admissions only as they relate to racial minorities. Legacy admissions — the practice of offering priority admittance to students whose families attended the university previously — would continue to give a leg up to certain applicants (who tend to be whiter and wealthier), even though racial minorities had just been denied the opportunity to get their own leg up in service of diversity.
Some schools have heard this message loud and clear. In fact, a handful of major institutions have announced that they’ll no longer engage in legacy admissions, in order to level the playing field after affirmative action-based policies were struck down. Those universities include MIT, Amherst College, Carnegie Mellon, and Wesleyan University, whose president Michael Roth explained the change this way: “We will still value the ongoing relationships that come from multi-generational Wesleyan attendance, but there will be no ‘bump’ in the selection process.”
READ ON: This Vox piece offers an in-depth look at how legacy admissions (as well as athletic recruiting) tips the scale for certain types of students, all of which is totally kosher in the eyes of the Supreme Court.
How much does it cost to attend college these days?
For students who do make it into their school of choice (or any school, for that matter), getting a foot in the door comes at a steep price: The Educational Data Initiative found that the average cost of college in the U.S. is currently $36,436 per year, though it can get much higher — tuition at Ivy League institutions is nearing $90,000 per year. (These numbers are especially eye-popping considering the discourse around the declining value of college degrees these days.)
Coming from a wealthy family means you’ll be able to pay for a prestigious education, but it’s also a pretty reliable indicator of whether a student will get into the college they want in the first place. A new analysis of attendance records found that one in six students at Ivy League schools have parents in the top 1% of earners across the U.S. — and even though these wealthy students are much likelier to be admitted than those with less money, they don’t typically have better grades or a more challenging course load.
READ ON: This New York Times story dives deep into how wealth influences who gets into which universities — and why some say “affirmative action for the rich” is running rampant in our education system.
Why do we care so much about the Ivy League, anyway?
Unless you attended one (or aspire to), it could be easy to write off these 12 schools — which include the likes of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale — as impenetrable fortresses of privilege where the richest of the rich congratulate each other on their expansive bank accounts. But these universities do reliably turn out the most successful people in the United States.
“Compared with attending one of the best public colleges, attending an Ivy or another super-selective private school increases a student’s chance of reaching the top of the earnings distribution by 60 percent,” Annie Lowrey writes in a must-read story for The Atlantic. Here’s why that stat is so important: “That means that just by changing their admissions policies, these colleges could make the country’s leadership more socioeconomically diverse.”
READ ON: Frank Bruni’s book Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania was published in 2016, but it’s quite the prescient take on how we ended up in this current moment — and Katie’s 2022 chat with Bruni offers an up-to-date examination of the issue. We’ve also got a first-person account of one Columbia student’s grueling application process that’s equally revealing.
