WHERE THE EXCESS DEMAND IS.

Inside Higher Ed looks at the academic positional arms race, and concludes the upper-status individuals are winning.

That finding itself isn’t particularly surprising to Sara Goldrick-Rab, an associate professor of educational policy studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin. But seeing the same outcomes established over time -- the study looked at four cohorts, from 1972 to 2004 -- is yet another indication that, regardless of how many billions of dollars are devoted to closing this gap, there’s been little change.

“Sociology completely predicts this. The powerful will always find ways to preserve power, and whenever any given thing that the powerful have the other people get access to, they’ll find some way to get a handle on the next level,” Goldrick-Rab said. “The Race to the Top is at war with the equity agenda. The effort to be the best and brightest in the world, to be the most elite in the world, is naturally conflicting with the efforts of those who would like to see people be more equal.”

There's no necessary conflict here; no reason that the higher education industry can't expand the ranks of the best and the brightest by casting the nets more widely.  What too much of higher education has done, however, has thrown in with the egalitarians in the most destructive way, by admitting unprepared people and calling it access.  It doesn't have to be this way.  Additional capacity at the high end means additional places for students.

And, as the report says, it’s not just the students who are competing to be the best -- it’s the colleges, too. The benefits of enrolling a high-achieving student body -- more prestige, higher rankings in U.S. News & World Report, better job placement and more generous alumni, to name a few -- have just been too tempting for institutions to pass up, the authors say.

“The problem is that institutions are partly responding to what the public is telling them they want,” Goldrick-Rab said. “So long as our colleges and universities continue in this never-ending Race to the Top, that’s going to perpetuate the inequity among students almost no matter what we do to try to bring students along.”

George Leef is skeptical of that claim.

I don’t applaud Harvard for its Scrooge McDuck attitude toward its finances, but that’s not an “inequity” toward students from poorer families. They can go elsewhere and succeed just as well in life.

Yes, if those students have parents who value education, if they grow up in school districts that don't produce Distressed Material for the colleges, if the universities they enroll at recognize they are in the same business as Harvard or Wisconsin rather than sub-prime party schools.