In December, education researchers Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery released a new study that examines the rate at which high-performing, low-income students apply to selective colleges and universities. The media, quick to catch a headline, overanalyzed the study’s findings into yet another instance of American education in crisis. See, for instance, the lead sentence in a Bloomberg piece on the subject: “The real crisis in American higher education is that our best colleges never see a large chunk of our smartest students.”
One way to rebut the media’s yarn is to defend the education low-income students receive at local colleges and universities. Cedar Riener, an assistant professor at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, took this approach in a particularly eloquent response. Like myself, he acknowledges the reasons why we evaluate the application patterns of low-income students to selective colleges and universities. He also highlights the value many of these low-income students derive from the education they receive at less selective, often local, colleges and universities.
I agree with much of what he writes, but I have a different reaction to the media. Rather than defending less-selective colleges and universities, I want the “more selective” schools to defend their recruiting practices. Admission offices target the wealthy schools—public and private. They cultivate relationships with these schools’ counselors, sometimes admitting weaker students in the hopes of receiving even stronger applicants the next year. The high schools that the majority of low-income students attend—the mediocre public high schools in otherwise unglamorous cities, suburbs, or rural areas—receive minimal recruitment attention from the most selective schools.
These colleges are always going to find a handful of low-income students through traditional routes. What worries me is that they won’t attract low-income students any other way. Elites should feel obligated to increase economic diversity by recruiting low-income students in new, more informed ways. Students who are slated to attend a local university (but may have a better chance of success at a school more in line with their goals) deserve the opportunity to make informed decisions just as much as the low-income kids at more prestigious high schools, or the wealthy students anywhere.
Economic diversity and college recruitment matters. On a personal level, for those talented students who are overlooked in the recruiting process. But also on a national level because without it, higher education remains divided into two categories—the selective and the less selective—which gives way to Riener’s justifiable defense that “less selective” institutions often provide students with an equally high-quality degree. Increasing economic diversity requires that we re-define selectivity as a measure of quality, rather than a correlate to family income. And addressing the challenges to economic diversity on college campuses ensures the continuation of a difficult conversation about class-based differences and opportunity, one that defines so much of the American Dream.
In my mind, the Hoxby/Avery paper isn’t novel in that it exposes how few high-flying low-income students are applying to the most selective schools. It’s novel because it should incite a conversation about what the colleges could be doing differently, not what the students are doing wrong. It’s about how the selective colleges could behave if they so desired. They could (and I believe should) expand their recruiting practices and change the way they evaluate admission applications. It’s about ensuring that the choice to apply and enroll at a “more selective” college or university isn’t reserved for only a slice of students with access to resources and recruitment. Colleges have the capacity to move away from a model that treats privilege as merit. Doing so can equalize students’ access to opportunity—that’s why economic diversity at elite colleges matters.