No crocodile tears for crazy colleges

The frozen halls of Hinman College, Binghamton University, my college home 1969-1974.

Amidst the insanity of the past year, American universities and colleges have contributed their own share of absurdities. Primary among them has been to abandon any commitment to academic merit among their applicants, as well as to academic rigor of their curricula, programs and majors, to be replaced by virtue-signaling of the most banal kind, i.e., throwing the college's wealth and parents' and taxpayers' precious tax dollars at attempts to correct their own 'institutional racism,' while all the time claiming that they are the solution for society rather than the source of the problem.

This has also led lazy 'journalists' to take up a new cudgel, to attempt to point out 'inequity' wherever it may be found. Two articles -- meaning at least two journalists -- seem to have embraced this assertion of equity over academic excellence, while decrying as evidence, the fact that the economically elite are 'overenrolled' at the most elite colleges and universities. As Inside Higher Ed asks rhetorically in the sub-headline: "Article reports that 29 percent of students at Brown and Dartmouth are from private high schools. Other Ivies are also high. Is this the way colleges should admit students?" Taking the article from The Atlantic a face value, this report from Inside Higher Ed decries the fact that the more elite colleges enroll the more economically elite students, and offer it as irrefutable proof of the institutional racism of the colleges. The lack of self-awareness, and the embedded irony and hypocrisy of the author of original The Atlantic article is nauseating. Worse, she offers no solutions, no constructive alternatives, just sophomoric platitudes such as this:

In a just society, there wouldn’t be a need for these expensive schools, or for private wealth to subsidize something as fundamental as an education. We wouldn’t give rich kids and a tiny number of lottery winners an outstanding education while so many poor kids attend failing schools. In a just society, an education wouldn’t be a luxury item.

I’ll use just one opening claim to try and make my point:

Parents at elite private schools sometimes grumble about taking nothing from public schools yet having to support them via their tax dollars. But the reverse proposition is a more compelling argument. Why should public-school parents—why should anyone—be expected to support private schools? Exeter has 1,100 students and a $1.3 billion endowment. Andover, which has 1,150 students, is on track to take in $400 million in its current capital campaign. And all of this cash, glorious cash, comes pouring into the countinghouse 100 percent tax-free.

Private school students ARE part of public education. ‘Public’ schools aren’t open to the public. Rather they are open only to the people who can afford to live in the district. What about the elite ‘public’ school parents who want their tax dollars to go to their neighbors? It gets worse in college. E.g., Why should Loyola full payers be required to support need-based aid?

Despite virtue signaling and throwing full-payer funds at social justice and to less and less each year to academics, the true mission of any elite high school – public or private – is to get their grads into an elite college, full stop. College counselors and teachers get fired for failure to achieve this mission. Why? Because the parents call the shots. Why is anyone surprised?

Don’t be surprised if one found that family income is powerfully correlated with – and causal of – plenty of other things that colleges use in their admissions process than SAT scores. Every issue of ‘holistic,’ i.e., non-merit-based, ‘non-discriminatory,’ or woke admissions can probably be traced back to family wealth, unless you set up a quota system to accept a certain percent of your students from ‘under-resourced’ high schools, or unless you look at their tax returns and show some favor to low-income families.

She completely and conveniently ignores all the aid dollars being spent from endowments and full-payers to make the true cost of private high school or college something wholly unlike the sticker price. Acknowledging that would destroy much of her argument so ignore it she does.

Her real argument is against merit, in favor of social justice, which is the mistake that many of the colleges are making in shifting funds from academics to social justice programs, including aid, counseling, programs, consultants, special services and more. As Steve notes, it’s the quality that really matters in the long run.

By the way, just how diverse is the Atlantic’s readership? Do they charge lower subscription prices to low-income readers? Of course not! But why not? And how much did The Atlantic pay her to write this drivel? Payment and publication apparently have little to do with the merit, logic or coherence of the article, just its shock value.

Despite the tripe, I’ll give her a few points for this quasi-insight:

But what makes these schools truly ludicrous is their recent insistence that they are engines of equity and even “inclusivity.” A $50,000-a-year school can’t be anything but a very expensive consumer product for the rich. If these schools really care about equity, all they need to do is get a chain and a padlock and close up shop.

The lack of self-awareness, and the embedded irony and hypocrisy of the woke college administrators is just as nauseating. We need educational vouchers and more academics, more unbiased, reliable and valid objectivity and less arbitrary and biased subjectivity, and less hypocrisy and virtue signaling from the very elite who are now trying to buy a conscience.

The problem takes me back to the sage advice of my former mentor, Tom Scheye, who while extolling the critical need of a college for a clear mission, he noted that the underlying problem is, as he quipped, "No money, no mission." Rich colleges can afford to be so foolish as to lose sense of their true academic mission. But their students and the rest of the country can't afford such nonsense.