WHAT IS SEEN AND WHAT IS UNSEEN. The "College 2005" insert in the November 2005 Atlantic Monthly includes a number of articles contemplating the tension between merit and access. I am pleased to report that the articles do more than the usual navel-gazing about the thirty or so expensive finishing schools that claim to be the five best colleges. I am less pleased to report that each of the linked articles is behind a subscription wall. You may thank me in advance for developing some proficiency in touch typing (and the backspace is a heck of a lot more convenient than that correction fluid.) First up, Ross Douthat, a recent and disillusioned Harvard graduate asks, "Does Meritocracy Work?" His conclusion: too well, for reasons not entirely the fault of higher education.

In this inherited meritocracy the high-achieving kid will not only attend school with other high achievers but will also marry a high achiever and settle in a high-achieving area -- the better to ensure that his children will have all the cultural advantages he enjoyed growing up.

Ah, the old assortative mating bugaboo? In a milieu which an apprentice characterizes as "drive-through divorce" with assortative mating, is the college Diversity Office now supposed to expand the mating pool? Let's stick with the facts on the ground. The key to the tension between merit and access is this.

Through boom and recession, war and peace, the proportion of the poorest quarter of Americans obtaining college degrees by age twenty-four has remained around six percent.

Why? Here, the first thing that is not seen.

Certainly, policies that strengthen families or improve elementary education undercut social stratification more effectively than anything colleges do. For now, however, numerous reasonably prepared students -- 300,000 a year, by one estimate -- who aren't going to college could be.

I'll return to Mr Douthat's thinking about access shortly. But notice what slips into that first sentence. Poverty as a consequence of poor life management skills? How many observers have shied away from that inference for fear of being mau-maued for blaming the victim or ordered to the corrective labor camp to be made more culturally competent? More specifics.

The higher one goes up the income ladder, the greater the emphasis on education and the pressure from parents and peers to excel at extracurricular achievement -- and the greater the likelihood of success.

Is there, anywhere, a program of sensitivity to the special needs of the disadvantaged that can overcome external reinforcement of internal ambitions? Or is that simply cooling out the mark?

Mr Douthat follows that observation with a curious parenthetical.

Even the admissions advantage that many schools give to recruited athletes -- often presumed to help low-income students -- actually tends to disproportionately benefit the children of upper-income families, perhaps because they are sent to high schools that encourage students to participate in a variety of sports.

What is seen and what is not seen, again. Compare and contrast collegiate hockey in the East (home-grown preppies) with that in the midwest (recruits off the iron range and the Canadian tundra.) But the elephant in the room is the exploitation of predominantly African-American youth in basketball and football, the so-called income sports, whose unpaid labors incompletely subsidize the entire intercollegiate athletics enterprise. Title IX of the 1971 Civil Rights Act mandates subsidies to female runners, gymnasts, equestriennes, tennis players, golfers, in proportion to the womens' share of the applicant pool. And you're surprised that well-off parents wouldn't pick up on that? Why not end the exploitation of the football and basketball players and drop ALL the athletic scholarships? It's easy to allocate zero dollars in proportion to any definition of the share of females in the pool of potential applicants.

Mr Douthat considers a number of reforms. Some have merit. Sometimes he gets a bit silly.

Public universities that spend more to improve access and graduation rates could make up for it by cutting, say, faculty salaries. Public schools already have a hard time keeping sought-after teachers from jumping to private colleges; if more money were spent enrolling and graduating poorer students, the problem would worsen?

What, you mean I get better working conditions and get paid more money? It's not the teachers that are sought-after. It's the researchers. Increase my class size? You've cut my pay. Request that I spend research time filling in progress reports for students admitted under various special criteria? You've cut my pay. Downsize the faculty and reduce the pool of colleagues working on similar projects? You've cut my pay.

The article is worth a look, warts and all. Hit your library. It's possible that the "College 2005" material will move to a free archive once the rents have been extracted from the Must. Read. It. Now. set. If the memory serves, I will advise readers of its availability.