Wealthy students with high standardized test scores make up the majority of students at the most selective universities, which also spend far more on student instruction than less selective institutions. So where does that leave everyone else?
Roughly two-thirds of students at the top 50 private universities—and more than half of those at state flagships—come from families in the top income quintile.
Erin Clark/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
Despite the Trump administration’s claims that some of the nation’s most selective colleges have admitted legions of students with low test scores to advance racial diversity, new research shows that’s largely not happening.
Instead, a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research this week used decades of federal data to lay out the reality: The most accomplished high school graduates—who tend to come from higher-income families—make up the vast majority of students enrolled at the nation’s best resourced, selective public and private institutions. Meanwhile, their peers with lower standardized test scores, who are more likely to come from lower-income families, more often end up at higher education institutions that spend far less on each student’s education—if they go to college at all.
For example, in 2019, spending on per-student instruction increased 29 percent for every 100 average SAT points of enrolled students, according to the report. At the same time, roughly two-thirds of students at Ivy League and other top-50 private universities—and more than half of students at state flagships—came from families in the top income quintile. Income distributions of students at less selective public and two-year colleges were broader and more reflective of national income distributions.
Given those disparities, “it’s high time we interrogated what we are doing with this admissions system,” Jesse Rothstein, director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the paper, told Inside Higher Ed.
“The Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision or the attacks on DEI presume that the only legitimate way to do things is to admit the students with the highest SAT scores,” he said. “Arguably, what you should be doing is admitting the students who have the most ability to benefit, and it’s not at all clear that that’s best captured by prior achievement.”
But even as selective institutions have become more reliant on using test scores as an admissions metric over the past 50 years, the resource gaps between the wealthiest universities and the rest have widened.
In 1969, per-student instructional expenditures at the most selective institutions (enrolling the highest-testing students) were about double the expenditures of the least selective colleges.
By 1993, more selective colleges were spending 150 percent more per student than the least selective colleges. By 2019, they were spending 200 percent more. According to the paper, the widening gap came during “a period of substantial state disinvestment from public higher education in terms of states’ block funding allocations.” Universities that admitted higher-testing students “were relatively more successful at privatizing and raising greater replacement revenue from their students,” and also used private gifts and government research contracts to subsidize instructional activities.
Though resource stratification across universities has leveled off over the past decade, in large part because of increased public funding for less selective colleges, disparity within institutions is on the rise as the more lucrative majors are increasingly adopting supplemental achievement-based admissions policies.
‘Meritocratic Consensus’
`The paper describes the widespread acceptance of this resource stratification as “meritocratic consensus,” which Rothstein argues is overdue for reconsideration.
“It’s taken for granted that the objective of college admissions is picking out the smartest students, and that somehow it will all be better for everybody if they go to the most selective schools, and the students who aren’t as well prepared go to less selective schools,” he said. “There’s just not much evidence for that assumption.”
But there is evidence that higher per-student spending is associated with higher graduation rates and higher-paying jobs, he said. The additional resources that would be most beneficial to cash-strapped, open-access institutions vary by institution but could include “smaller class sizes, better facilities and better support for students to help them navigate the school and get them through their program,” Rothstein said, noting that less selective colleges serve students that often need those resources the most.
“If you take a straight-A student and send them off to college, they probably are going to be just fine when they get into a college class,” he said. “But if you take a student who struggled in high school and send them to college, they may need a little bit more scaffolding and support to get through college. Tutoring, mentoring and support programs are very effective, but they cost money.”
Spending money to close the disparities between the most selective and least selective institutions is key to raising the college-attainment rate nationwide, he added.
“If we really think that the route to a middle-class job is for everybody to get a college degree, then we need to make it feasible for students to get college degrees who were not the top of their class in high school,” Rothstein said. “If in fact it’s the case that more resources spent on lower-achieving students would be productive, then we’re leaving a lot of value on the table by not doing that.”