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April 22, 2004
As Wealthy Fill Top Colleges, New Efforts to Level the
Field
By DAVID LEONHARDT
ANN ARBOR, Mich. At prestigious universities around
the country, from flagship state colleges to the Ivy League, more and
more students from upper-income families are edging out those from the
middle class, according to university data.
The change is fast becoming one of the biggest issues in higher
education.
More members of this year's freshman class at the University of
Michigan have parents making at least $200,000 a year than have parents
making less than the national median of about $53,000, according to a
survey of Michigan students. At the most selective private universities
across the country, more fathers of freshmen are doctors than are
hourly workers, teachers, clergy members, farmers or members of the
military combined.
Experts say the change in the student population is a result of both
steep tuition increases and the phenomenal efforts many wealthy parents
put into preparing their children to apply to the best schools. It is
easy to see here, where BMW 3-series sedans are everywhere and students
pay up to $800 a month to live off campus, enough to rent an entire
house in parts of Michigan.
Some colleges are starting to take action. Officials long accustomed to
discussing racial diversity are instead taking steps to improve
economic diversity. They say they are worried that their universities
are reproducing social advantage instead of serving as an engine of
mobility.
"It's very much an issue of fundamental fairness," Lawrence H. Summers,
the president of Harvard, said in an interview. "An important purpose
of institutions like Harvard is to give everybody a shot at the
American dream."
The University of Maryland recently said it would no longer ask
students from families making less than $21,000 a year to take out
loans, and would instead give them scholarships to cover tuition.
Officials at Harvard, the University of North Carolina and the
University of Virginia all recently announced similar, even more
generous policies.
Stanford and Yale have altered early-admission programs, partly out of
a concern that they give an unfair advantage to students who do not
need to compare financial-aid offers before they can commit to a
college.
Over all, at the 42 most selective state universities, including the
flagship campuses in California, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan and New
York, 40 percent of this year's freshmen come from families making more
than $100,000, up from about 32 percent in 1999, according to the
Higher Education Research Institute. Nationwide, fewer than 20 percent
of families make that much money.
The recent increase has continued a two-decade trend that extends well
beyond the best-known colleges.
In 2000, about 55 percent of freshmen at the nation's 250 most
selective colleges, public and private, were from the highest-earning
fourth of households, compared with 46 percent in 1985, according to
the institute, which is based at the University of California, Los
Angeles.
The number from the bottom fourth dipped slightly over that period,
while those from the middle 50 percent fell sharply. In many cases, the
less wealthy students went to less selective schools, including
lower-ranked campuses of state universities.
"There has been over the last several decades a whole slew of efforts
to level the playing field for college admissions," said Alexander W.
Astin, a professor of higher education at U.C.L.A. "In spite of all
these efforts, access for poor kids and kids of less well-educated
parents has not improved. And for kids in the middle, it's actually
declined."
"This isn't good news, and it's somewhat surprising," he added.
If anything, some college officials said, the statistics may understate
the level of student wealth because they rely on a survey of freshmen.
When officials at Binghamton University, part of the State University
of New York, matched survey data with financial-aid forms, they found
that students often listed their parents' income as lower than it
really was, said Cheryl Brown, the director of undergraduate admissions.
At Harvard, for instance, financial-aid forms suggest that the median
family income is about $150,000.
The increasing wealth on the nation's most prestigious campuses has
gone largely unnoticed until recently, though, obscured by two other
trends, education scholars say.
Over the last 40 years, colleges have become more diverse in other
ways, admitting far more Asian-American, black, Jewish and Latino
students than they once did. Many colleges also draw from a broader
geographic base, with Michigan taking more out-of-state applicants, for
example, Ivy League universities relying less on students from the
Northeast and almost all colleges recruiting more foreign students.
Colleges have meanwhile increased tuition rapidly, causing the number
of students on financial aid to jump and creating an impression that
they are from a wider economic spectrum than in the past. In reality,
financial aid simply stretches far higher up the income ladder than
before.
At Michigan, admissions officers created a new section of the
university's application where high school students can say how much
money their parents make and whether any of their grandparents went to
college. Michigan started devising the questions last year when the
Supreme Court was considering its affirmative action policies. The
court ultimately upheld affirmative action but required the university
to eliminate a point system that gave extra points to minorities.
With the new questions, Theodore L. Spencer, director of undergraduate
admissions, said Michigan wanted to give proper credit to students who
had compiled good academic records without the advantages that others
had. "We certainly want to look at ways to create a better distribution
of students," he said.
Michigan is still not dominated by wealth as some private colleges are.
Almost half of its students are from families earning less than
$100,000 a year, the student survey shows. But the changes are still
unmistakable, say professors and others here.
"When most people think of a typical college student, they're thinking
about eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and having massive
debts," said Scott E. Mendy, a junior from Tigard, Ore., who receives
financial aid. At Michigan, he said, "people live very well."
Summer jobs? Many undergraduates do not think twice about accepting an
internship that barely covers their expenses. Many can afford to take
spring break trips to Mexican resorts or Europe. Extracurricular
activities often seem to be run by students who can devote dozens of
hours to them each week without trying to hold down a campus job, said
Angela Galardi, a senior who recently completed a term as president of
the student government.
The forces behind the rising wealth on many campuses seem to be both
economic and psychological, university officials say. As the income of
college graduates has risen much faster than that of less educated
workers, getting into the right college has become an obsession in many
upper-income high schools.
With the help of summer programs, preparation classes for college
entrance examinations and sometimes their own private admissions
counselors, students in these schools assemble more impressive
applications than they once did. They also apply to more top colleges.
The advantages of campuses with increasingly wealthy student bodies are
obvious, educators say: the colleges have more resources for research
and student activities, more professors doing cutting-edge work and
more students who received solid high school educations.
But they also have much steeper tuition bills than in the past, and
this seems to have turned off many middle- and low-income families.
Some students are not willing to take on the tens of thousands of
dollars of debt that is often necessary. Others, studies show,
underestimate the available amount of financial aid.
"We were founded on the principle of allowing larger numbers of
students to go to college in an affordable way," Mr. Spencer,
Michigan's admission director, said. "But having said that, the price
of college has gone up, and many of the truly needy will not bother to
apply."
That concerns people here and on other campuses because of what it
could mean for the variety of campus life and for the broader economy.
"We're very worried," said William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's director of
undergraduate admissions. "There are some very, very talented kids in
the bottom quartile who aren't even going to college. It's a huge waste
of talent."
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