Via Matt Yglesias, the Quick and the Ed offers an absolutely terrific article about the effect of class on access to college, using AJ Soprano as an example. On The Sopranos, AJ was a delinquent, who nevertheless got sent off to college because of the tireless efforts of his mother, and the family’s money. Drawing on new data from the Department of Education, the authors show that this is all too real:
The fourth bar on the graph represents the A.J. Sopranos of the world, those who scored in the bottom 25 percent (the first achievement quartile) on standardized tests as high school sophomores and came from families earning more than $100,000 per year. Despite their academic shortcomings, 58.4 percent of these students went on to college. For high-income students in the second achievement quartile–still below the median–the college-going rate was significantly higher, 85.3 percent.
This is a higher rate than that for those directly opposite A.J.–students from the highest achievement quartile and the lowest income level, less than $20,000 per year. 80.3 percent of these meritorious poor students went to college, which means that nearly 20 percent did not. High-achieving wealthy students, in contrast, went to college at a 96.2 percent clip. In other words, high-achieving poor students are five times more likely than high-achieving rich students to skip college in the first two years after high school.
I feel like I’m pounding on this issue a lot lately, but it’s important, and not discussed anywhere near enough. For whatever combination of historical reasons, it’s taboo to talk seriously about class in America, but it’s a very real issue, with very real consequences for students and families. The wealthy do very well here, while the poor see roadblocks thrown up in their path again and again, and end up trapped in bad circumstances.
Children from wealthy families have access to resources and connections that low-income children simply do not. No matter how much we try to pretend otherwise, class is a huge problem in this country, and it’s not going to get any better until people face up to it.
But I’m sure some angry preacher ad-libbed something regrettable in a sermon recently, and it’s much more important that we run around getting ritual denunciations from everybody.
Pedantic Quibble: That’s not social class, that’s wealth. In the traditional sense of the word, simple wealth is not enough to join a class. Let’s face it, in no Universe would A. J. Soprano be considered upper class.
Main Point: While we should be doing everything we can to make sure those who aren’t wealthy can have the means to go to college, And let’s face it, there is more we can do. I don’t see why we should complain that wealthy people who didn’t do as well in high school are going to college. The vast majority of these people are not going to prestigious schools, thereby taking that slot away from someone more deserving. (a couple hundred thou a year just isn’t rich enough to buy that kind of influence) They are going to whatever lower tier school will accept them. And they are undoubtedly paying full tuition to do so. Some of them even buckle down and make something of themselves.
Suggestion for future posts: Your choice of rhetoric is rather annoying. To compare everyone who comes from a family that makes more than $100,000 a year to the Sopranos is, frankly, absurd. That ain’t anywhere near Soprano level money. Heck, In my county, the median household income falls squarely in that category.
tonyl: And where exactly IS your county? I live in the nation’s wealthiest congressional district (Fairfax Co., VA), and our median household income is sub 100k per annum.
tonyl: And where exactly IS your county? I live in the nation’s wealthiest congressional district (Fairfax Co., VA), and our median household income is sub 100k per annum.
no it isn’t: http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/demogrph/gendemo.htm#inc
For 2006:
Median household income: $100,300
Median Family income: $119,800
Ah, new numbers. We were in the ninety some odd thousands for median household. So, yay, I guess?
Tonyl- I agree that I’m more worried about the poor kids *not* going than the rich kids who *are* going.
Here’s my pedantic quibble- just because you live in a county with wealthy people, does not make 100k+ incomes non-eyebrow raising. In my world, and definitely the world of most of the under-20k/year, 100k/year is a lot of money.
I understand that, for various reasons, you may not want to be identified as upper-class. I also realize that you, or many with 100k+ incomes are not ‘set for life’ money-wise, and have to work to continue to live in the style to which they are accustomed. My point is, that class is partially relative.
Most of the below 20k/year people who go to college are fabulously wealthy if we compare them to huge chunks of the worlds population. Most of the people in those 100k+/year are fabulously wealthy compared to having-to-wonder where you next meal is coming from under-20k US citizens on foodstamps.
Americans that I’ve met, *never* want to be referred to as ‘wealthy’ or ‘upper class’… but I’ve still met some that don’t realize how incredibly spoiled they are because they have one less SUV than their neighbors. *rolls eyes*
Suggestion for future posts: Your choice of rhetoric is rather annoying. To compare everyone who comes from a family that makes more than $100,000 a year to the Sopranos is, frankly, absurd. That ain’t anywhere near Soprano level money. Heck, In my county, the median household income falls squarely in that category.
Well, it wasn’t my choice of analogy– the authors at “the Quick and the Ed” picked the Sopranos analogy. I wouldn’t call that Soprano level money, for the simple reason that the household income at Chateau Steelypips is well within that range.
I do agree that the biggest problem identified by the piece is not the underachieving rich kids who go to college, but the high-achieving poor kids who don’t go. But those underachieving rich kids are a great demonstration of the point.
I was never in any danger of not going to college, because both of my parents are college-educated, and our family income was adequate to provide for my education. There are large numbers of kids out there, though, for whom college is just not on the radar screen, because they don’t come from the right sort of background, and they don’t feel that they have the necessary resources. And those kids are having huge ranges of possibilities cut off because of that.
It’s not necessarily absurd. You can’t do a statistical study of people with Soprano level money because there simply aren’t enough of them. The paper Chad linked grouped everybody with >$100k incomes together because that let them break up the population into four segments with nearly equal populations. With some more effort they could have broken it down into deciles, but I doubt it would have changed the conclusion that some rich underachievers make it into elite schools, and that mediocre rich students are more likely to go to college than high-achieving poor students. If anything, I’d expect the disparity to become even greater if you look at the top decile against the bottom.
The conclusion of this paper should not be a big surprise to anyone who is paying attention. If you are at a high school where nearly all of your peers go to college, you learn the tricks for how to get in somewhere and how to pay for it. Students at Inner City High or Podunk Memorial School often don’t learn these tricks, especially the “how to pay for it” part.
Becca is dead on with this observation. On the campus where I work (a state university, no less), I regularly see undergrads driving late-model SUVs. And I don’t have to guess which income quartile these students, let alone the out-of-state student whose parents bought the house two doors down from mine for her to live in, come from. But it’s all relative; some of the kids who drive 2006 Ford Behemoths envy the ones who drive 2008 GMC Dreadnaughts.
There’s a book I read a few years back that had what seemed like a mostly-sensible approach to come of the issues here: The Stakeholder Society, by Alstott and Ackermann. The central suggestion is that post high-school, everyone receives a ‘stake’ valued at roughly enough to get them through a decent college (but that the choice of exactly what to do with that stake is up to the individual). The cost of such a program, at least for the US, is pretty small compared to other budget costs, and it fits right in line with the central tenet of my own politics (that all kids should be given a superb chance at life, and that it’s incumbent upon society to provide such).
**
Two other comments. First is to echo the class/wealth thing. Growing up, my father was (and indeed still is) a professor – so we (in the UK) were defined as being upper-class despite being at some points (not many) frankly poor. [Diverging: while I followed the college path, my siblings did not; noted only as a counter-example to Chad’s own anecdotal history.] Second is to ask “OK, so what now?” I mean, I’ve been fighting for socialism for twenty years now without measurable impact on US society at large. Other than (in my case) choose to take a position where at least *some* of my students will be first-generation college-goers, so that I might have some positive impact, what else?
{And wow to Fairfax. Living in Fairfield county, CT, I thought we were extreme – 2004 median of $61K, apparently; http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/09/09001.html – but that’s not even close!}
Oh, and on car anecdotes: I went to grad school in Charlottesville, Virginia, at U.Va, which has a very high upper stratum of family income among the undergrads. At one stage my ’88 Mitsubishi was in for some repair, and an undergrad was giving me a lift. She picked me up in a new Lexus; and apologised – apparently sincerely – because her Porsche was in the shop that day.
Then there was the student who moved into a new room (on ‘the Lawn,’ a central and prestigious location with much foot traffic) and brought with her (i) custom-made furnishings and (ii) a uniformed maid to install them.
It was a great place to go to grad school, and is a wonderful town – but I would *not* want to be a parent of an undergrad there!
Ewan: Don’t let the numbers fool you…Fairfax is a lot like Fairfield: Lots of multi-million dollar mansions along the water (for you, Long Island Sound, for us, the Potomac River), with the rest of us plebes living inland and commuting in to DC (as opposed to NYC). It skews the numbers somewhat (the wife is from Orange, CT, just over in New Haven County, so I get to drive through your bit of the country several times a year and have driven around a fair bit of western CT).
It’s not necessarily absurd. You can’t do a statistical study of people with Soprano level money because there simply aren’t enough of them.
It’s absurd in the sense that people with Soprano level money are not representative of the group. It’s like using someone from a family that makes $49,555 a year as a representative example of the $20,000-50,000 group to show how well off that group is. It’s a sad rhetorical trick to attempt to spin the debate one way. But, then again, I should look on the bright side, at least they didn’t use a Paris Hiltonesuqe character.
Of course, I should note that despite my annoyance at the spin, there doesn’t seem to be any disagreement amongst any of us posters about the actual meat of the post.
There is a pragmatic advantage of having an ability-blind admissions policy for the children of the wealthy, beyond the obvious potential for annual giving: someone’s got to be at the bottom of the (college) class. It’s quite a shock for someone who’s a high-performer in high school to be below average at college (and perhaps most tragic when they are from low-income families), but that’s what would have to happen if everyone who was admitted was a high-school high-performer. What better way to fill the role of college bottom-performer than with a slacker who expects to do poorly, yet has no worries about his future because of his family’s wealth and connections?
I have trouble with nomenclature in some of these comments, while strongly agreeing that Wealth is not Class.
When I was a little boy, the received wisdom seemed to be that “millionaire” = rich. Now it is clear that, with roughly 10^7 Americans living in millionaire households (at least $10^6 net worth), “millionaire” overlaps “upper middle class.”
The lowest rung of Rich, i.e. Lower Upper Class kicks in at about $10,000,000 to $20,000,000 in Southern California (your mileage may vary geographically, as the County data suggests). There is no upper limit for Middle Upper Class, where Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are esconced. But Upper Upper Class takes many generations to achieve.
In any case, the disparity of educational advantage certainly does exist as correlated with income, class, race, and location of one’s home.
I commented on this over in another thread of this blog this morning (Better Teachers Cost Money) by quoting from some experts in the field, rather than just my own hunches.
I think class is a good word here. The point is that these differences in wealth are carried from one generation to the next, and the country is divided into mutually noninteracting pieces as a result.
College isn’t the best path for some. If some of those high achievers don’t go to college (surely for cultural or bad advising reasons; anyone can get money for college if they know how) they will likely succeed on some other life path. Color me not-too-concerned by these data.
Over the years there have been many programs created to allow deserving students of all income levels to attend college. The problem is that every time such programs are implemented, the colleges simply raise their costs. There does not appear to be any interest from colleges and universities in making education affordable.