Socio-economic stratification in higher education

A little while back, I was arguing with some people that it was a problem that a disproportionate number of students from elite private high schools were getting into elite private colleges. I was challenged with the argument that those students were probably best qualified to get into those schools, which I could admittedly only dispute anecdotally by countering that there were many more people at my public high school who could have done well at the top elite schools than the number who got into them and that public schools usually pose some challenges that private schools do not: namely, distinguishing oneself among a crowded field.

In other quarters, it has been posited that maybe the elite universities like Harvard and Princeton are overrated anyway, bolstered by years of high placements on college ratings systems that do not consider the priorities most important to a good undergraduate education.

To this, I would counter that right now, those elite universities are the ones with so much of the money. As the New York Times reports (in their continuing excellent coverage of the socio-economic stratification that has risen greatly in the last ten years), the endowments for elite, private universities are much greater than those for even the elite, public universities. As a result, there is a danger of stratification in resources between elite, private universities and everyone else:

Until recently, top public research universities could count on enough public subsidy to hold their own, when the taxpayer money was combined with tuition and fund-raising.

“Having state support was akin to having an endowment,” said Donald E. Frey, an economics professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

But that world is changing.

The University of California, Berkeley, a prestigious public institution, has a $3 billion endowment, but it is stretched across 34,000 students. And with state budget cuts looming, Robert J. Birgeneau, its chancellor, says he fears he will no longer be able to attract the best professors and students.

The pattern of great wealth in elite, private quarters dwarfing everything below it has been born out in so many sectors of our society that it is hard to ignore that we are in another Gilded Age, that period in the late 19th Century when wealth was concentrated in a few hands and the government intervened on behalf of powerful industries while eschewing regulation that would benefit more Americans.