Why Acceptance to an Elite University is a Near Impossibility for Poor Students before the Application Process Even Begins

By Henry Carter ‘22

 In the United States, there is a pervading notion of elite colleges and universities as being great equalizers in our society. This idea seems to be confirmed both by the admissions process, which appears largely meritocratic in its consideration of standardized test scores and each applicants’ unique circumstances as well as the practice of affirmative action, which has been upheld by the Supreme Court with some limitations since universities adopted the practice following the passage of the Civil Rights Act. However, examining the demographics of selective universities make it abundantly clear that these measures have done anything but make their student bodies representative. In the United States there are 38 universities, most of which have competitive admissions, that have more members of their student body from the top 1 percent of incomes than the bottom 60 percent. Though only 2.2 percent of graduating high school students will receive their diploma from a nonsectarian private high school, these students are wildly overrepresented in highly selective institutions – 28 percent of Princeton students and 26 percent of Harvard students meet this criteria. Whereas 0.5 percent of students from the poorest 20 percent of incomes attend an “elite” institution, 25 percent of those in the 99th percentile of incomes do so. Worryingly, the data is not showing improvement. In fact, there has been a backslide of equal representation in the upper echelons of higher education in the past few decades, with 54 percent of students at the 250 most selective institutions belonging to the bottom 75 percent in 1984 as compared with 33 percent in 2010. Evidently, the systems currently in place to give working class students the same opportunities as members of the upper middle class have been anything but effective. These issues of representation are often attributed to the ways in which the admissions process is inherently skewed towards the affluent and how upper-middle class families leverage their wealth to provide their children with significant advantages in this process. However, more or less ignored are the structural issues present in the American educational system that systematically shut the poor out of an adequate education. The mechanisms of educational inequality ensure that the quality of a child’s education and academic career are solely dependent upon the relative wealth of their parents.

Currently, public schools derive most of their funding from property taxes, which can lead to large inequities in funding and thereby cause great disparities in the quality of education available to students. The Department of Education reported in 2015 that the “wealthiest 25 percent of school districts received 15 percent more in per-student funding from state and local governments as compared to the poorest 25 percent of school districts … that accounts for a $1,500-per-student funding gap, a gap that has grown by 44 percent since the 2001-02 school year”. Nowhere is this gap more evident than in my home county of Fairfield, Connecticut, where the town of Greenwich spent $6,000 more per student than Bridgeport, which is just a 30 minute drive away. This funding gap creates a tangible difference in the caliber of education provided to students and cascades throughout the rest of their time in school, with under-resourced schools producing students that by all measures perform poorer than their wealthier counterparts.

Though public schools are free, the de facto tuition is the price of living in a wealthy community, where home values effectively preclude the possibility of relocation for those without a fairly large income. This dynamic is exhibited by towns like Scarsdale, New York, where schools produce large numbers of successful applicants to Ivy League schools, but the median home price hovers around $1.4 million. Properly-resourced public schools are almost exclusively contained within wealthy districts, and there are simply no cheap options for the less affluent to move into these districts. The lack of affordable options is not a coincidence. Funding schools primarily with property taxes has created a paradigm in which “the political culture of upscale suburbs revolves around resource hoarding of children’s educational advantages, pervasive opposition to economic integration and affordable housing”. Because the quality of a child’s education depends on the relative wealth of the district’s residents, it makes sense to keep towns as segregated as possible. In this way, “good parenting” is now predicated on the deprivation of other children and other communities at large. This conflict means challenging the clearly unjust funding of schools is immensely unpopular among suburban families, a fact which many politicians seem to understand given their relative silence on the issue.

One proposed solution has been to introduce voucher programs intended to provide low-income students with the option of attending schools outside their district. However, these programs do not address underlying issues that prevent under-resourced schools from improving. Inequality researcher Clint Smith describes this issue, arguing that the notion of school choice does not reckon with the fact that “the disparities in school funding and quality are not simply grounded in the different socioeconomic demographics of neighborhoods, but rather are the result of decades of public-policy decisions meant to socially and economically isolate black people and many immigrants.” In this way, the element of competition supposedly introduced by voucher programs is rendered ineffective as schools in impoverished areas are subject to forces much larger than those of the market and cannot meaningfully improve without measures to counteract systemic discrimination. 

Not to mention, well-off parents who don’t reside in a relatively affluent area can pay exorbitant tuition for their children to attend private schools which generally have smaller class sizes, produce students with higher test scores, and generally provide better educational opportunities than many public schools. This option, combined with the exclusivity of public schools, means that wealthy families can leverage their money in exchange for a good education while the students of poor families languish in inferior schools.

The evident problem, then, is that the better resourced a school is and the more educational opportunities it provides to its students, the more they will develop academically and the more prepared they will be for each successive step in their educational career. Children with affluent parents are given a head start from the time they enter kindergarten, and lower-income students are forced to play catch-up. Though we’d like to think that students’ ability is not primarily a consequence of their circumstances of their education and that innate intelligence will inevitably conquer adversity, this is simply not the case. William Stancil, an education policy scholar, notes that “Students who grow up facing discrimination, segregation, and poverty really do tend to have much lower standardized-test scores and briefer résumés, and graduate from less rigorous high schools. This occurs not because these students have lower aptitude, but because the scars of systemic prejudice are real … in most people, individual aptitude and the effects of systemic disadvantage are bundled together.” It is critically important to understand that children who enroll in underperforming schools will tend to underperform in their academic career not because they are inherently less capable than their wealthier counterparts, but because they have been given a subpar education. Though this underperforming is also a consequence of a number of other interweaving systems of discrimination, the inadequate education provided to low-income students is a crucial ingredient. This translates to generally lower standardized-test scores, lower grades, and less extracurricular activities, essentially closing off later academic opportunities that may serve as vehicles of social mobility.

When it comes time to prepare applications, then, poor students face insurmountable odds that have been increasing since the time they enrolled in kindergarten. Nevermind the college prep services and expensive extracurricular experiences that bolster the resumés of their wealthier counterparts, the American educational system alone has made acceptance nearly impossible through its reliance on property taxes and its incentivizing of economic segregation. Though efforts to make the college admissions process more fair to lower-income students may ameliorate some of the representation problems evident in elite universities, no real progress can be made until the glaring issues present in the education of working-class students from kindergarten through high school are addressed.