For quite a while now, some leftists have been pushing colleges and universities to adjust their admissions so that they’ll have a nice percentage of students from poorer families. Any middling student from any economic background can get into a college, but the meddlers want the “prestige” schools to admit a quota of them. Why? Supposedly, going to a top college means that you will do better in life, and if more kids from poor families do better, that’s a step toward “social justice.”
In today’s Martin Center article, David Randall of the National Association of Scholars takes a hard look at this notion and finds it unpersuasive.
Randall writes, “The call for ‘economic diversity’ is yet another sign of colleges abandoning the pursuit of educational excellence. But even if you do think colleges should serve an economic purpose — and public universities, at the very least, ought to provide taxpayers a decent economic return on their investment — ‘economic diversity’ misses the point.”
Right — this is just more of the incessant social engineering we get from “progressives” who always have schemes for making society better. Randall looks at the reasons advanced for this and finds them feeble. Here are three:
I would add that going to a “prestige” school often means getting less of an education than elsewhere, as the professors are usually too busy to devote much time to students who need help.
Instead of this diversity fixation, Randall suggests colleges strive to make themselves more affordable to students from all economic backgrounds, writing, “We should adopt the goal of ‘economic self-sufficiency.’ That’s a fancy way of saying we need colleges that cost $10,000 a year, bringing America back to the ratio between median income and college costs we had in 1971. $10,000 colleges will serve the middle classes, not the parasitic rich. That should be the goal, whatever the means. But a side-benefit of that goal is that, to get there, you’d probably have to fire all the administrative commissars and drones infesting higher education.”
Yes!