The concerns mentioned so far have been with student responsibility and choice. However
@Wminus in
comment #4 made a point that is also relevant in whatever the larger debate here might be about educational costs and who should bear them & why:
Wminus said:
if you're from Cornell it'll generally be easier to convince employers to hire you even if the physics programs at Cornell and Stony Brook are mostly the same (and there are other advantages to attending a top uni too - like contacts). It's stupid/unfair, but that's just how the world works.
The issue for me (and I'm not alone) is that a systemically inequitable society, if things get extreme enough, tends toward self-destruction; historical examples abound. Obviously the complicity of great universities as well as many other institutions in the perpetuation of inherited wealth is a centuries-old tradition; nonetheless we would be better off, given the worsening political & economic polarization in the U.S., attempting to improve the situation; a nearly impossible task and best done by inches if it can be done at all. Along these lines I found a relevant article from the January 28
Economist: "
Colleges and inequality: New data show that joining the 1% remains unsettlingly hereditary". Here's the gist, from a couple of paragraphs near the the top:
"New data on American universities and their role in economic mobility—culled from 30m tax returns—published by Raj Chetty, an economist at Stanford University, and colleagues show that some colleges do a better job of boosting poor students up the income ladder than others. Previously, the best data available showed only average earnings by college. For the first time, the entire earnings distribution of a college’s graduates—and how that relates to parental income—is now known.
"These data show that graduates of elite universities with single-digit admissions rates and billion-dollar endowments are still the most likely to join the top 1% (though having wealthy parents improves the odds). And despite recent efforts to change, their student bodies are still overwhelmingly wealthy."
And here's the link to the actual study: "
Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility," Chetty et al, 2017. Here's the abstract; as usual it's a single paragraph, but I've broken it up for easier reading. What I find encouraging is that the focus is constructive, as you'll see from the summary sentence:
"We characterize rates of intergenerational income mobility at each college in the United States using administrative data for over 30 million college students from 1999-2013. We document four results.
- First, access to colleges varies greatly by parent income. For example, children whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile.
- Second, children from low and high-income families have very similar earnings outcomes conditional on the college they attend, indicating that there is little mismatch of low socioeconomic status students to selective colleges.
- Third, upward mobility rates – measured, for instance, by the fraction of students who come from families in the bottom income quintile and reach the top quintile – vary substantially across colleges. Much of this variation is driven by differences in the fraction of students from low-income families across colleges whose students have similar earnings outcomes. Mid-tier public universities such as the City University of New York and California State colleges tend to have the highest rates of bottom-to-top quintile mobility. Elite private colleges, such as Ivy League universities, have the highest rates of upper-tail (e.g., bottom quintile to top 1%) mobility.
- Finally, between the 1980 and 1991 birth cohorts, the fraction of students from bottom-quintile families fell sharply at colleges with high rates of bottom-to-top- quintile mobility, and did not change substantially at elite private institutions.
"Although our descriptive analysis does not identify colleges’ causal effects on students’ outcomes, the publicly available statistics constructed here highlight colleges that deserve further study as potential engines of upward mobility."
