The XX Factor: What women really think.

Rich Kids Have Enough of a Leg Up Already

A guest post from Slate intern Emily Lowe: 

I have to disagree with you, Jessica, on the idea that college admission boards favoring rich kids is not a problem. There are already plenty of ways in which the children of deep-pocketed parents have a leg up on their less-privileged counterparts. Starting as early as pre-K, wealthy families have the option of sending their kids to swanky private schools, where the combination of stellar faculty, name recognition, and powerful alumni networks paves the way for admission to top-notch colleges. 

College students from wealthy families can also take unpaid internships in New York City and Washington, D.C., while their not-so-wealthy counterparts spend summers working jobs to cover living expenses that might not be so résumé-boosting. (I'll openly admit to being one of the former; I get to intern for the XX Factor this semester while many of my classmates must dedicate those out-of-class hours to paying gigs.) There's also the more extreme example of some parents buying internships for their kids, a phenomenon Slate's Tim Noah discussed here.

Jess, you ask in your post: "Is it worth going into serious financial jeopardy so you can have an Ivy League degree?" But the recession's impact isn't limited to the biggest and best private schools. It's hitting everyone, from the Ivies to the smallest liberal-arts colleges. That means students in need of financial aid will have trouble getting into any school where money is tight—and that's every school. Sure, it would be great for the next wave of coeds not to have huge student loans to pay back when they enter the workforce. But if the alternative is no college degree at all, a few thousand dollars' worth of debt doesn't sound so bad.

Colleges Give Rich Kids a Leg Up This Year

Though some have speculated that the recession might create more equality in the domestic sphere, apparently the recession means less of an even playing field when it comes to college admissions. According to the New York Times, in this time of plummeting endowments, colleges may be looking more favorably on students who can afford tuition without financial aid.

Colleges say they are not backing away from their desire to serve less affluent students; if anything, they say, taking more students who can afford to pay full price or close to it allows them to better afford those who cannot. But they say the inevitable result is that needier students will be shifted down to the less expensive and less prestigious institutions.

I wonder if this is such a terrible thing. Even without the recession, my generation is crippled with staggering debt, mostly from higher education. If there's no guaranteed reward of a moderately well-paying job at the other end, is it worth going into serious financial jeopardy so you can have an Ivy League degree?

What Would Smith Do?

Depressing findings from the Chronicle of Higher Education: Even though well-off colleges say they're trying hard to recruit low-income students, the numbers are going in the wrong direction. At the 75 schools with endowments over $500 million, the share of students who received Pell grants, which means they come from families that make less than $40,000 a year, dipped from 14.3 percent in 2004-05 to 13.1 percent in 2006-07. The trend is the same at the 39 tippy-top richest schools: 19.6 percent of students there were low-income in 2004-05, compared with 18 percent two years later.

The time frame under study is short, to be sure. But it also matches a period in which colleges have been talking up class diversity, and in which the idea has been floated as an alternative to race-based affirmative action. The falling numbers show that well-qualified poor applicants don't submit applications in droves to the well-endowed schools, and that the schools haven't really figured out yet how to find them. A few campuses have shown that it's possible to improve at that task. The Chronicle noted schools that are exceptions to the rule because they have posted small gains: Amherst, Holy Cross, Williams, Princeton, and the Universities of Richmond and Texas at Austin. At Smith, 25 percent-plus students are low-income; at UCLA, 35 percent. What are those schools doing differently?

That's the big question, I think. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts, but my own sense is that the answer is not the big feel-good initiative that Harvard and Yale announced this winter: expanding financial aid so that it covers families that earn up to $180,000 or $200,000 a year. As this persuasive NYT op-ed points out, most schools don't have the money to give aid to upper-middle-class families (I hope that $200,000 a year still gets you into that category) as well as truly needy ones. And so, as the op-ed by former Columbia Dean Roger Lehecka points out, the Harvard and Yale move "sets an example that is likely to make it even harder for low-income students to attend the best college for which they are qualified." So forget Harvard and Yale—among the private colleges, what's Smith doing? Or Princeton or Williams or Holy Cross or Amherst?

(Cross-posted at Convictions.)