Obsession with elites won’t fix inequality

Spend any time at all in New York, and you cannot fail to be struck by the number of people who are struggling on the streets, whether because of mental illness, drug addiction or other misfortune.

For a visitor from Europe, the very visible consequences of the lack of a safety net is sobering. This may be the land of opportunity, but it is also emphatically a land of haves and have-nots.

New York’s street corners represent the extremes, but the issue of inequality runs wide and deep, as was discussed at the THE World Academic Summit, held with New York University (NYU) earlier this month.

The Harvard University economist Raj Chetty, who is behind seminal work using data to examine social mobility in particular, laid bare the extent to which elite universities are perpetuating privilege rather than challenging it, with a simple graph that demonstrated the rock-solid correlation between family income and a student’s chances of attending college, and getting a high-paying job after graduating.

And while the super-elite universities might be expected to buck this trend with their unparalleled ability to select the highest performing students in the country regardless of ability to pay, Chetty turned his data gaze on to his own university to demonstrate that just 3 per cent of students came from the bottom 20 per cent of the income distribution, while 15 per cent came from the top 1 per cent.

The correlation between family wealth and chances of attending an Ivy League university hardly varied when controlled for academic ability in the form of SAT scores.

This deeply ingrained inequality, and a fear that higher education could be adding to social stratification rather than delivering social mobility, was a theme throughout the NYU summit.

Gary Younge, professor of sociology at the University of Manchester, made the point that social mobility could not and should not be sold as being solely about “more of us, fewer of you”, since who gets in contributes substantively to the quality and depth of educational experience for all.

Ananya Mukherjee, vice-chancellor of Shiv Nadar University, added that even the framework on which admission decisions are made is flawed, arguing that to consider “merit” as an objective criterion overlooked the fact that it was also a “construct of what comes before”.

Among the most impassioned warnings about the US experience, however, came from Anthony Marx, former president of Amherst College, who now heads the New York Public Library.

Marx recalled leading a commission on the future of the community colleges – the real workhorses of social mobility. “People looked at me like I was crazy – why would you pay attention to the community colleges?” he said. “But there are millions of students graduating a year, and we are ignoring them.”

This lack of attention, or failure to fully value, the institutions doing the heavy lifting is a theme on both sides of the Atlantic.

In a summit session on higher education and the media, it was pointed out by Scott Jaschik, editor of Inside Higher Ed, that in the US, all the attention from the mainstream media focuses on a relatively small elite of perhaps 200 research-intensive universities and colleges.

In the UK, arguably, the number is two: the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. This obsession with Oxbridge manifests itself in all sorts of ways, but to take just one, consider the media attention given to the regular celebrity-endorsed scholarship schemes to fund under-represented groups at Oxbridge, despite the tiny impact of such initiatives on the overall problem of educational inequality.

That is not to criticise such well-meaning contributions nor to suggest that the Harvards and Oxfords do not have an important part to play. But compare the positive attention such schemes garner with the negative pressure that is now routinely applied to the lower-tariff universities that are doing the vast majority of the work on social mobility.

The truth is that, like the societies they serve, university systems are just that – ecosystems – and need to be understood and protected as such. When politicians praise the research elites but bash, through political expediency, those occupying other parts of the ecosystem, they damage both – and ultimately us all.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com