Sandy Baum - Can College Level the Playing Field?: Higher Education in an Unequal Society

CAN COLLEGE LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD?

OLLEGEEL THELAYINGIELD

igher Education in an Unequal Society

ndy Baum and Michaelherson

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2022 by Princeton University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Baum, Sandy (Sandra R.), author. | McPherson, Michael, author.

Title: Can college level the playing field? : higher education in an unequal society / Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson.

Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021035181 (print) | LCCN 2021035182 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691171807 (hardback) | ISBN 9780691210933 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: College attendanceSocial aspectsUnited States. | People with social disabilitiesEducation (Higher)United States. | Education, HigherAims and objectivesUnited States. | Education, HigherSocial aspectsUnited States. | BISAC: EDUCATION / Higher | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Social Policy

Classification: LCC LC148.2 .B38 2022 (print) | LCC LC148.2 (ebook) | DDC 378.1/980973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035181

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035182

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Peter Dougherty, Alena Chekanov

Production Editorial: Terri OPrey

Text Design: Layla Mac Rory

Jacket/Cover Design: Layla Mac Rory

Production: Erin Suydam

Publicity: Alyssa Sanford, Kathryn Stevens

We dedicate this book to our grandchildren: Margaret, Frances, Sadie, and Naomi McPherson; Theodore and James Baum Schwerin Fischer; and those yet to be born. They bring us joy. We hope that they will join with others in building a better society than the one into which they were born.

1. ix
2. 219
3. 237

Many friends, colleagues, and family members helped us to think through the ideas in this book. We are grateful to all of them. Our editor Peter Dougherty provided strong encouragement and waited patiently while we worked. David Baime, Harry Brighouse, Catherine Bond Hill, and Kailey Mullane read earlier drafts of the book and made very helpful comments and suggestions. Rachel Schwerins skilled editing significantly improved our writing.

Michael McPherson is deeply grateful to the Spencer Foundation for providing a working and learning environment that supported his early work on this project. The W. T. Grant Foundation provided funding that allowed us to benefit from the excellent work of Urban Institute research assistant Victoria Lee.

For each of us writing this book is the culmination of years of professional experiences, exchanges of ideas, and reading of others work. Our own personal and professional collaboration is a privilege we cannot imagine doing without.

CAN COLLEGE LEVEL THE PLAYINGFIELD?

The United States is one of the most unequal countries in the developed world and inequality is growing. Reversing this trend is vital to our nations future. It is not just the gaps in income and wealth that are unacceptable. Individuals have vastly unequal opportunities to end up at the top (or the bottom) of the ladderno matter how hard they work, how smart they are, or how lucky they are (excepting only luck in their choice of parents).

Higher education generates seemingly contradictory realities, acting as both an instrument for improving individuals economic status and a means of reproducing social inequality over generations. This book analyzes and evaluates the role of higher education in creating and reducing inequalityand in the different but related function of facilitating economic mobility for some while creating barriers for others.

Our goal is to shed light on how the expansion of education, which used to be referred to as the great leveler, may now exacerbate rather than attenuate inequality. Has something gone fundamentally wrong? Should higher education now be viewed as a cause of, not the cure for, widening income gaps and diminished opportunity?

Our central thesis is that to remedy inequalities in access to higher education opportunities and their outcomes we must both mitigate the inequalities facing children and diminish the extreme variation in labor market rewards facing students as they emerge from school and move on through their working lives. The starting points for the next generation of children are determined by the level of education, earnings, career status, and wealth of their parents. By the time they reach college age, many young people have had their development shaped by inferior K12 experiences, poor neighborhoods, inadequate housing and health care, and limited opportunities for emotional and intellectual development. The postsecondary education system must do more to compensate for these problems, but it cannot eliminate their effects. Compensating at later ages for the effects of early inequalities in childrens treatment and opportunity is more expensive, less effective, and more limited in reach than preventing the inequalities in the first place.

Access to educationand in this day and age particularly to higher educationis supposed to help solve these problems. Although going to college does not pay off for everyone (and there are some colleges that fail most of their students), higher education dramatically increases the chances that people will do well in life, no matter where they started out. Just 8 percent of adults with only a high school education are among the highest-income 20 percent of families in the United States, compared with 38 percent of those with a bachelors degree or higher; 27 percent of the first group and 7 percent of the second are in the lowest fifth of the income distribution.

Which quintile you wind up in matters more now than it did fifty years ago. The share of income held by the families in the top fifth rose from 41 percent in 1967 to 49 percent in 2017; the bottom fifths share fell from 5.4 percent to 3.8 percent over these years.

Inequality is a problem because it means that people at the lower end live with so much less than othersnot just in material terms but in terms of the opportunities associated with access to resources. Life expectancy is correlated with social status, not only because of unequal access to health care and behavioral differences related to smoking, exercise, and diet. Evidence also suggests that people with less sense of control over their daily lives and less autonomy at work are more susceptible to a range of health problems.