Part of what Washington Monthly looks like is graduation rates, but it also looks at whether the student’s income is at least 150% above the poverty line and whether (and how much) their student loan is going down. According to the section on the methodology, they had to switch to these measures as the ones that were providing an idea of the income hadn’t been released for a few years. I don’t recall all the details exactly, but the source is linked above.
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That’s a start, but poverty line is a pretty low bar… How about ability to leap into the 1%…
Not good, but not uncommon. The Millionaire Next Door (a book from the 80s or 90s that is still an important read) described this very phenomenon.
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If colleges hope to decrease inequality by educating low income students then it seems contradictory to define a successful outcome as their graduates moving from poverty to part of 1% of American families.
Doesn’t the idea of the “1%” refer to a society made up of highly stratified incomes? I suppose it does not have to be. Certainly, there would be a 1% even if inequality and its associated problems didn’t exist, but that is the way the “one percent” is casually discussed --those that are stratospherically rich leaving the rest of the country behind. So with social mobility defined as going from poverty to the 1%, inequality remains; the players have just shuffled positions.
I do agree 150% of the poverty line is a way too low bar though as a marker of social mobility. Maybe something more like low income graduates reaching at or above median income of other students who graduated from that college in the same year and also being satisfied with their careers would be a great outcome
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What if we split the difference? The NYT interactive chart on college social mobility has a ranking for “The share of children who were from the bottom fifth of incomes as students and moved to the top fifth as adults”:
A lot of variables that need to be factored in, including choice of major and sample size, but the data is out there.
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There will always be economic inequality in a capitalistic society. That’s the nature of the beast. Your alternative is socialism or worse? That said, a very objective way to measure social mobility would be to compare the college graduate’s income at some # years out vs their parents’ income. Those colleges with the most graduates crossing into higher income percentiles would be ranked higher.
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Legacy preference seems more like the academic equivalent of crony capitalism.
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Nepotism, cronyism, or whatever you want to call it, is as old as humanity and transcends legacy admissions and capitalism, itself. You’re taking on a much bigger issue now. 
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However, capitalistic societies with limited SES mobility end up with more discontent among lower SES people who see no way up in the existing system and become more prone to supporting stuff like communism or racism, or generally degrading societal trust (crime, scams, etc.) out of desperation. The challenge of capitalism is to keep it so that everyone has a stake in it through SES mobility, rather than the existing upper class taking all of the economic growth themselves while erecting barriers to entry against others who try to compete for a share of it.
Legacy preference in college admission may not be that big a factor in the above, but it is at least a small step in the direction of entrenching the existing upper class and limiting the opportunities of others.
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Do people really aspire to this?
Socialism represents a fairly common support and distribution system in some of the world’s most prosperous countries. To suggest that this is bad refects personal opinion, as well as perhaps an under-recognition of the many socialist programs currently in place in the U.S.
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What makes economics work is competition under a set of relatively fair rules, not some blind faith. Without fair competitions, a society loses its dynamism. No one can argue that legacy preference promotes competition or is a fair rule. It’s the exact opposite.
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Legacy preference is not blocking social or economic diversity at the elite universities. Yale’s CDS for 2021-2022 reports only 37% of matriculants were native whites, 15% were Hispanic Americans, 8% African Americans, 21% Asian Americans, 10% nonresident aliens and the rest unknown or smaller groups. According to the separate factsheet from the Office of Institutional Research, 56% of the first year class were receiving financial aid averaging over $57,000 (2019-2020). Legacy amounted to 14% and overlapped with the foregoing categories-probably mostly in the native whites but I know several legacies who are of different ethnicity.
If you got rid of all legacy that does not mean even fewer whites or more on financial aid. Maybe just more wealthy Asians and whites. And if all affirmative action categories go away as well (which the Supreme Court may rule) you would have definitely more Asians and whites.
Be careful what you wish for
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“Native whites”?
That’s a new one
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Look at the documents and pick your own labels. The documents have a category for “white” and have another category for “nonresident aliens “ (which includes white Canadians and Europeans as well as other nationalities). Native whites is a common sociological term but I await your better term
Not at all. I wasn’t talking about economic systems. I was talking about what is the best way to measure whether attending a particular college leads to social mobility. Leaping from low income to the 1% isn’t how I’d ideally measure social mobility, particularly because income isn’t the only indicator of socioeconomic class and status —picking reaching the 1% as a marker seems too blunt a measure for mobility. Also as I understand it, there are wealthy nations with both more social mobility and less inequality than the U.S… And finally some schools, claim that their “generous” need based financial aid policies are designed to make college accessible to low income students in order to reduce the societal inequities that stem from wealth & income inequality.
Merely catapulting their graduates into the 1% doesn’t necessarily meet that goal. However, even if graduates leaping into the 1% doesn’t reduce the negative consequences of income inequality, it does reduce poverty and that alone is a great outcome in and of itself.
All of that said, financial aid policies at some of the most generous schools serve a lot more students than those at 150% of the poverty line. Families can make over 150% of poverty and still qualify for a pell grant. Thus, it doesn’t make sense (to me) to use that as a measure given earning 150% of poverty would actually be an indicator of downward mobility for some pell grant recipients!
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I view the issue of diversity a little differently. Lack of diversity is a problem for a society because it can’t realize its full potential without fair competitions among all its members. On the other hand, the results of fair competitions among its diversified group of members aren’t guaranteed to be equally diversified.
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Fully agree that crony capitalism is wrong; however, I disagree with the premise that legacy admissions is tantamount to crony capitalism. Legacy admissions is like getting a top job: most opportunities are not advertised and connections count for a lot.
But then isn’t capitalism where connections matter more closer to crony capitalism than capitalism where competition is based on factors other than connections? Also, legacy preference in college admissions and getting jobs through connections are both examples of adding advantage to those who are more likely to be already advantaged in other areas, so that goes opposite to the idea of a “level playing field” that offers opportunity for all to compete.
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But that’s how the world works. Shouldn’t kids get used to that at an early age? Why live in a bubble? Not that it’s fair, but it just is what it is…
But why make it even less fair?
As long as everyone passively accepts the existing upper class hoarding more opportunities for themselves (and their descendants) and erecting higher barriers in front of everyone else who has the potential to outcompete them, the slow slide to crony capitalism continues. And with that, more people feel that the system is not working for them, making it easier for them to support stuff like communism or racism.
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