You would think the title of this post would qualify as a straight-up tautology, but that apparent fact doesn’t stop a thousand stories from being published about how we can attack economic and social inequality by getting more poor kids into elite colleges and universities.
The latest entrant into this genre comes from the University of Michigan, a great public university for which I have a lot of affection. I got a hat trick of degrees from the place in the 1980s, when you could pay your tuition by mowing lawns in the summer if you were willing to walk to school uphill both ways in the winter. (Not really: UM was the most expensive public school in the country at the time. Still, in-state undergraduate tuition was around $4,000 per year in 2017 dollars).
Anyway, I’m betting the U got a bit embarrassed by this fascinating story published in the Times in January, which among many other things revealed that Michigan students born in 1991 — roughly the class of 2013 — came from families with a higher median income ($154,000) than at any other highly selective public college in the nation. (You can use the story’s interactive feature to look up all sorts of income stats for thousands of colleges and universities).
So last week Michigan announced that it was going to provide free tuition to in-state undergraduate students from families making less than $65,000 per year (This is just about the median for family income in the state. Note that family income tends to be around 20% higher than household income, which is the more commonly cited figure).
UM President Mark Schlissel surprised the audience inside the Michigan Union by announcing the creation of the Go Blue Guarantee to kick off the meeting Thursday, prior to the Regents’ vote on the budget for the upcoming year.
Schlissel became emotional when talking about the opportunities the initiative would afford for low and middle income families after the Board of Regents approved the budget with a 7-1 vote.
“We now guarantee those with the most need can afford a University of Michigan education,” Schlissel said. “The Go Blue Guarantee cuts through the complexities of financial aid to help us reach talented students from all communities in our state. I’ve always believed that talent is ubiquitous in our society, but opportunity most certainly is not.”
“I think about the seventh grader in Ypsilanti or Detroit or Grand Rapids whose mom or dad can say to them, ‘Work hard. Do well in school. You can go to the University of Michigan,'” Schlissel added. “There are a lot of folks now that can’t really say that because they don’t know if they can afford it. Now there’s a whole rising generation in our state that can aspire to our great university. I’m extremely, extremely proud of that.”
Now I think this is a fine thing to do. Still, it’s going to cost the university almost nothing, for reasons that should be sobering. Michigan estimates that the Go Blue Guarantee is going to cost an estimated $12 to $16 million per year, which works out to $277 for every student enrolled at the Ann Arbor campus. That campus has a $7.5 billion operating budget, and an endowment which is probably north of $10 billion at the moment. So the cost of this initiative isn’t exactly a rounding error, in the same sense that the football coach’s salary isn’t a rounding error, but it’s not as if the administration is going to have to dig around in the couch cushions either. And of course the initiative itself will provide a prime opportunity for yet more fundraising.
The reasons guaranteeing free tuition for in-state students whose families make less than $65,000 is going to cost almost nothing are:
(a) Such students were already paying little or no tuition, because of a combination of federal Pell grants, state, local, and private scholarships, and university-provided need-based aid; and, crucially,
(b) Only a small minority of Michigan students come from families making less than $65,000 per year.
How small is hard to say exactly, but given that per the tax records used in the NYT story two thirds of all undergrads came from households in the top 20% of family income, and only 3.6% came from families in the bottom 20% of income, it seems likely that no more than one in seven or eight Michigan in-state undergrads would qualify for the Go Blue Guarantee (and as noted, these students were already paying fairly minimal if any tuition).
Now why do so few Michigan students come from genuinely middle class — let alone working class or poor — families? It’s not because Michigan is an expensive school: for such students, it isn’t, except in the sense that spending four or more years in college is always expensive at least the short term, even for people paying little or no tuition, because of opportunity costs.
It’s because Michigan is a very hard school to get into: the median SAT/ACT test scores for matriculants are in the 98th percentile, and their median GPA was 3.83, i.e., almost straight As. And of course upper class students are far more likely to have very high test scores and excellent high school grades than students from less privileged backgrounds.
All of this is to say that elite institutions are by design, conscious or otherwise, replicators of existing class hierarchies, and must be so by their very nature. Making extra efforts to find exceptionally academically talented and hardworking kids from non-privileged backgrounds is nice — again I’m all for such efforts — but such efforts have nothing to do with genuine egalitarianism, because they are ultimately the opposite of that.
There is something both pitiful and disturbing about Schlissel’s advice to “work hard, do well in school, and you can go to the University of Michigan.” For the vast majority of kids who are given this advice, this is flatly false. They can’t go, because they don’t and will never have the ability to get admitted to a highly selective college. They don’t both because the vast majority of people don’t have this ability — that’s literally what it means for a college to be highly selective — and because, even among people born with the potential for academic excellence, those born into privilege will have countless advantages, big and small, in the social competition to achieve academic distinction.
But even if the latter fact were magically eliminated or less magically ameliorated, the former circumstance — that the vast majority of people are never going to get into elite colleges — would remain completely unchanged.
And none of this even touches on a host of issues surrounding what sorts of advantages people of different class backgrounds do or don’t get by attending an elite, or semi-elite, or wanna-be elite college. (Regarding this point, see Elizabeth Armstrong’s and Laura Hamilton’s excellent Paying for the Party).
In a country in which the ruling political party’s economic mantra might as well be “fuck the poor,” the message that if you’re a poor kid from Ypsilanti — this is also a code for black naturally — you should work hard so you can go to the University of Michigan for “free” counts as a progressive political position. It really isn’t, but I suppose for the moment it will have to do.
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