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“We've indeed created a unique and very efficient system to preserve class privilege…”
Oldcommprof, in response to Laurie Fendrich's Brainstorm
(April 29, 2011) in The Chronicle of Higher Education
…and we call it a “meritocracy.” Like civil-service exams, college admissions and the test scores that they to some degree rely on were meant to sort the worthy candidates from the unworthy, without regard to social or economic status. So too the favorable treatment of students who have taken college-prep curricula and AP courses, volunteered, played sports, and the like.
But the reality is that between the curricular inadequacies of under-resourced schools and the small amount of time for extracurricular activities that students from financially stressed households are likely to have, our criteria leave educationally underprivileged students even further in the dust. By the time they reach college, these students' class status has been solidified through the cumulative effects of everything from verbally (as well as financially) impoverished households to inadequate college preparation and counseling.
So what can we do to mitigate the effects of this class stratification—to become the agents of mobility that we advertise ourselves to be? First, we have the major responsibility to prepare K-12 teachers, two promising models for which (from Alverno College and Teach for America) were described in an earlier (November/December 2010) issue of Change. Schools of education should benchmark their practices against those of more successful institutions so that they can stay ahead of policymakers' increasing insistence that we turn out teachers whose students demonstrably learn, no matter what neighborhoods they live in.
The next key action is to build bridges across the chasm between high school and college. In this issue, Judith Bilsky describes how this has been done in one state, Florida, where over 100 faculty members from high schools and colleges collaborated to create the Postsecondary Readiness Competencies, align them with the K12 Sunshine State Standards, and coordinate them with the national Common Core Standards (discussed by Kati Haycock in the July/August 2010 issue)—all in order to create a new postsecondary placement test. Cal State has a similar initiative, described in an interview of David Spence in Change's May/June 2006 issue; its exam is administered early enough in students' secondary education to enable them to address their deficiencies in the senior year of high school.
Then we come to the “little sort” and “big sort” described by Sandy Baum and Michael S. McPherson in this issue. The little sort is the one most of us think of when discussing college admissions: privileged high school students' mad scramble to get into the most selective college they can. This anything-but-free for-all kicks up so much dust that it obscures the big sort, in which high school graduates are dropped into a coin-sorting machine and come out a slot labeled Selective College (quarters), the Local U or Community College (nickels), or No College at All (pennies).
Baum and McPherson have specific suggestions about how to make the little sort less socially wasteful. Regarding the big sort, they recognize that colleges and universities can't overcome the harms done by inequality all by themselves. “But,” they say, “higher education is not helpless. Past efforts to extend educational opportunities to previously excluded groups, including blacks and women, show some of the potential here. Determined efforts by higher education leaders both to improve the pre-college preparation of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and to enroll more of them who are qualified can make a difference.” When colleges do increase the numbers of students from different racial, ethnic, socio-economic, and ideological groups, as Lee Cuba and his colleagues tell it in this issue, students take notice and their classroom experiences improve.
For those who prefer to do their part in making the system work more equitably by focusing on what's happening on campus, George D. Kuh, Jillian Kinzie, John H. Schuh, and Elizabeth J. Whitt have some suggestions. The NSSE has identified which colleges are better than others at offering high-quality educational experiences that demonstrably improve student success, and these authors have studied, and describe here, their cultures and strategies.
Significantly, the institutions that do this good work generally accomplish it with few additional resources. We need to get students into and through our institutions, having learned what we want them to learn, as cost-effectively as possible. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education recently pointed out that average college tuition in the past 25 years has risen 440 percent—four times the rate of inflation. All our efforts to be more equitable in providing access to and success in colleges and universities will be moot if we put it even further out of the economic reach of the very students we're trying to serve.
And those may be your children or grandchildren. I said 23 years ago, to a faculty critic of an article I wrote on technology and college costs, that the differential rate at which faculty salaries and tuitions were rising meant that that he risked being unable to afford to send his children to the very university at which he taught. Call me Cassandra, but I believe that that dire prediction is even more likely to come true today.
So for our own sakes, as well as because of a commitment to notions of justice and equity, I suggest that we all dip our oars into whichever of these waters we sail in.
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