In recent years, some of our nation’s elite colleges have been publicly shamed for failing to enroll low-income students. A recent study conducted by economists Caroline Hoxby and Sarah Turner found that these shaming tactics have caused other problems.
In the effort to remain “woke,” these colleges have reacted to the shaming in a knee-jerk fashion, which has hurt qualified needy students along the way and penalized schools that are actually attracting large numbers of low-income students.
According to Hoxby and Turner, efforts by researchers and think tanks to rank colleges and universities by the number of low-income students they have enrolled has caused these schools to change how they enroll students, disadvantaging some low-income students in the process.
Both Hoxby and Turner were early pioneers in research aimed at getting more qualified, low-income students to apply, enroll, and excel at our nation’s top colleges. The economists argue that the same line of research they have inspired has shamed well-respected schools into changing their admissions practices and policies without a “thoughtful” or “proactive” approach to boost the representation of low-income students.
Hoxby and Turner note that national measures such as the Pell Grant eligibility threshold cause significant distortion in the admission of certain low-income students over others that might just be a little better off than others. They also found that universities ranked highly on the popular measures can actually serve disproportionately few low-income students, and that the reverse was true for universities ranked at the bottom by these measures.
In other words, popular national metrics are failing to properly portray which schools actually lag and which schools lead.
“These measures are not measuring what they’re supposed to be measuring,” notes Hoxby.
Hoxby and Turner propose an alternative system of measurement that solves for the inaccuracies of other metrics.
While their methodology sounds like it is more accurate, it is still just a measurement of low-income enrollment and will not change the way these schools manage their admissions processes, which are influenced by pressures to meet certain “quotas.”
Affirmative action, whether racial or socioeconomic, has no place in academia. Applicants deserve to be judged on the basis of merit; qualified students should not be punished simply because their family is at a different income level.
Colleges and universities should work with underserved high schools to help pave the way for lower-income students through bridge programs. Unfortunately, such a proactive approach is unrealistic for most schools since it would not have an immediate impact on their enrollment metrics.
Brendan Pringle (@BrendanPringle) is writer from California. He is a National Journalism Center graduate and formerly served as a development officer for Young America’s Foundation at the Reagan Ranch.
