Opportunity-Hoarding and College AdmissionsĮven without well-to-do parents resorting to illegal acts-from paying for bogus athletics scholarships for their children to rigging SAT exam scores-there are still plenty of perfectly legal ways in which parents work the system to their advantage. Nothing has made that more clear than the recent college admissions scandal. Those effects, however, can only be discerned once we discard the ideological assumption that social and economic advancement follows educational attainment. The truth of the matter is that the interaction of class differences, education, and economic conditions has created an unstable mix of effects on social mobility. This is “dangerous talk” indeed-the phrase that the writer James Agee used to describe comfortable solutions based on misdiagnosing a problem, and that John Marsh applied to the claims that education by itself will undo inequality in his book Class Dismissed. As Richard Reeves, the Brookings Institution researcher, put it: “Shock, horror! Wealthy Americans are using their money to buy their children places at elite colleges.”īut that didn’t stop many from composing paeans to the power of education as an engine of social mobility, such as Dan Greenstein and Jamie Merisotis’ 2015 Wall Street Journal opinion piece.
It turns out everybody knew the fix was in when it comes to college admissions, even before Operation Varsity Blues, the FBI investigation that exposed a $25 million cash-for-admissions scandal. Dan Greenstein and Jamie Merisotis, “Education Does Reduce Inequality: The Premium commanded by a college degree has risen even as the market has been flooded with graduates,” Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2015. The idea that education is the bridge to economic opportunity and social mobility is gospel in American public discourse. Colleges is rigged in every way,” Brookings Institution, March 13, 2019.Įducation remains the chief American institution that promotes economic and social mobility for poor and disadvantaged citizens. Reeves, “Dream Stealers: How entrance into elite U.S. But here’s the thing: the whole system is “rigged” in favor of more affluent parents.
Shock, horror! Wealthy Americans are using their money to buy their children places at elite colleges.