Most definitely agree with this. Parents who invest in education and are knowledge workers often seek the same for their kids.
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Except that the large majority of people who attend college are not “knowledge seekers”. The middle class and upper middle class kids who go to college because A, that is what everybody is doing, and not going to college creates a serious social stigma, and B, they need it for getting a job.
I’ve taught these kids, and the bulk of each class are kids just doing the work to pass the class. I will get maybe 2 to 5 “knowledge seekers”, from a class of 80-100.
BTW, I have taught a couple of thousand students at three flagship public universities, and one non-flagship research university.
However, what is shared among kids who attend college, is that they are middle class or wealthier. 65% of the top 20% by income attend a 4-year college. Fewer than 30% of the families in the 40%-60% by income attend a 4 year college, around 20% of the 20%-40% attend a four years school, and fewer than 15% of the bottom 20% attend a 4 year college. Around 30% of each of these percentiles attend a 2 year college.
So 80% of all students at the 2,000 4 year colleges are middle class or wealthier. 62% are in the top 20% by income.
So all that having a college degree really indicates in that a person has the economic wherewithal to attend college. And wealth, or lack thereof, is generational, with upward mobility has been stagnant in the USA for decades.
The majority of students that I have taught, had they grown up in poverty, would not have ended up attending college.
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Well . . . stagnant from a high level. A few years ago, the Atlantic had an article by a UC Berkeley professor covering this (Prosperity, Not Upward Mobility, Is What Matters - The Atlantic):
"in 2014 a team of economists from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Harvard University, and the University of California, Berkeley examined almost 50 million tax returns in what is arguably the most extensive and rigorous study of social mobility to date.
Calculating three alternative measures of mobility, the researchers offered persuasive evidence that the United States has one of the highest rates of mobility in the world, ranking fourth, just behind Finland, Denmark, and Norway. Moreover, the findings showed no decline in the rate of social mobility among children born in the U.S. over the last 40 years."
and
"According to the Brookings Institution, 67 percent of Americans born in 1968 had higher levels of real family income between 1995 and 2002 than their parents had a generation earlier. The overall proportion of children who were better off than their parents increased to 81 percent when incomes were adjusted for family size; most of those who were not better off than their parents were born to families with the highest incomes. When broken down into upper and lower income groups, four out of five children from the bottom fifth of the income distribution had higher family incomes than their parents. The median income for this group was twice as high as that of their parents. "
This part was funny:
“social mobility is a zero-sum game, pitting everyone in the income distribution against each other—for every winner, there must be a loser. To be more specific, the top 20 percent cannot accommodate all of society’s households; thus, any rise in the flow of households from the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution to the top is, by definition, matched by an equivalent increase in the number of those who must drop out of the higher bracket into a lower one. So, as fair and beneficial as it may sound, an appeal to increase upward social mobility is necessarily an inadvertent demand for escalating downward mobility.”
Well, rather than social mobility, I should say - increased their standard of living. They’re right about of being a zero sum game, if we look at mobility in terms of where you moved up on the percentiles.
As a matter of fact, that is because it grew until the late 1960s, and has remained stagnant since then. So, if you compare salaries in the 1950s and 2002, the 1990s are higher, after adjusting for inflation, but not because there had been a steady growth in standard of living over all that period.
If you compare salaries from the early 1970s to 2002, there is little difference.
All they did was extend the time that they measured the economic changes to reach a time during which people’s standard of living grew, and pretend that standard of living had been increasing all that time. They made sure to include the huge economic boom after WWII into the 1960s, and ignore the fact that wages had not changed from the mid 1970s to 2002, and in fact, have not changed until now. That is not honest research.
It’s been 18 years since 2002, and wages are still no higher than they were in the mid 1970s, so the research that you are citing is both incorrect and out of date.
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Wealthy and upper middle class kids are even more concentrated when you consider the top schools (which are ostensibly the focus of this thread) with about 68% of students coming from wealthy families and only 4% from poor ones.
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My kid had extra time to take care of type 1 diabetes tasks (testing, injecting/pump use) and also, in college, a separate room so that the pump noises didn’t bother anyone else.
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Where do you get your numbers? Here is info from Harvard’s financial aid page:
55% of our undergraduates receive need-based Harvard scholarships.
20% of Harvard parents have total incomes less than $65,000 and are not expected to contribute.
Families with incomes between $65,000 and $150,000 will contribute from 0-10% of their income, and those with incomes above $150,000 will be asked to pay proportionately more than 10%, based on their individual circumstances.
Families at all income levels who have significant assets are asked to pay more than those without assets.
Two-thirds of students work during the academic year.
17% of the roughly 6,600 current undergraduate students are Pell Grant recipients.
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Honestly, I don’t remember exactly where I read it - I just recall being taken aback (also by the fact that Princeton was even more tilted to the wealthy with only 2% of poor kids). Raj Chetty of Harvard has studied this and concluded that despite the positive spin, elite schools remain largely closed to poor students. In fact his study indicated that the number of poor students enrolled at Ivy + schools hasn’t increased over the past 20 years. There is a good summation of his findings in this Atlantic article. The Myth of American Universities as Inequality-Fighters - The Atlantic
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I would look at the actual numbers on the financial pages for each school. I copied and pasted from Harvard’s site. Perhaps Chetty does not count all families with incomes under $65 as “poor,” nor should he. But through personal experience, I would say that elite schools are working hard to achieve more equity.
One way to do that is to plug talented middle school students in low income communities, into high school programs that prepare them. Students need to be able to do the work, and that problem lies in the earlier levels of education.
The Ivy schools I have been around talk all the time about socioeconomic diversity and they prospect for kids. Given equal qualifications I really do believe what I have read, that they would take an applicant from a low income public over, say, a boarding school prep student, with the idea that the opportunity will do more for the former.
However, legacy is a real problem.
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He definitely shouldn’t. That’s essentially the median income of US households.
Here’s a list of poverty levels:
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For what it’s worth, 24% of kids in Princeton’s class of 2023 received Pell Grants during their first year. That’s lower than the national average – 31% of undergraduates received a Pell Grant in 2019-2020 – but “poor” kids are by no means a rarity on campus.
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I’m pretty sure that a Harvard researcher is being very thorough as he evaluates the data and most likely has access to information that may not be publicly available. I don’t know why he would write a report showing that enrollment of poorer students has been stagnant if it isn’t true. Elite schools, like any organization, have numerous (and sometimes competing) institutional priorities. The strong preference for legacies, athletes (especially in niche upper class sports) and the children of donors (who are all accepted to elites at rates much, much higher than a typical applicant) helps to perpetuate a system that favors wealthier families.
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I wrote that “under $65k” should not be considered “poor.” (And my family fell below that actually.) I was only explaining the discrepancy between Harvard’s must touted 20% “under $65k” and Chetty’s numbers.
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I am sure there are differences in what he is classifying as “poor” and what Harvard and other schools do. At the end of the day it isn’t the specific percentages that are so important but the fact that elite schools still tend to favor the wealthy. Elsewhere I read that middle class students are increasingly missing at some of these schools as their families make too much to qualify for significant aid (although they may receive some) but don’t make enough to afford the $40-60,000 per year they’d still owe even after aid.
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About half of their undergraduate students are full pay, so probably in the top 4%.
But only about 10-20% have Pell Grants, meaning from the bottom 40-50%.
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That middle class dilemma has been a frequent topic here on CC for many years.
However, it’s a canard for the Ivy League (not for flagships etc. but specifically for these universities). Pell Grants cover poor AND lower middle class kids - hence the discrepancy between Chetty and other data. True “middle class” families pay nothing (65K ) at an Ivy or (65-180k) less than for their instate public flagships. 180-250k families pay more than 10% income but it remains quite a bargain. So, basically, there’s no “middle class dilemma” at the Ivies.
There IS however for families whose flagships have become out of financial range, or whose children have applied to universities that don’t have “super generous” FA. The number of universities that were previously affordable-with-merit or affordable-for-an 85-125k-families has shrunk tremendously.
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I’m not following you. The quoted stat is for people born in 1968. If it were true that real family income grew until the late 1960s (when the cohort referenced was born), and has remained stagnant since then, how would 67% of them have higher levels of real family income between 1995 and 2002?
In other words, it is measuring their income from ages 27 to 34, and comparing it to their parents at similar ages. It’s not measuring their real family income at birth, and comparing it to their parents at birth.
From the Pew Research article you cited:
“Cash money isn’t the only way workers are compensated, of course – health insurance, retirement-account contributions, tuition reimbursement, transit subsidies and other benefits all can be part of the package . . . According to BLS-generated compensation cost indices, total benefit costs for all civilian workers have risen an inflation-adjusted 22.5% since 2001 (when the data series began), versus 5.3% for wage and salary costs.”
That aside, I have yet to hear a cogent explanation of, if the standard of living hasn’t increased since the 1970s, how is it that people have so much more stuff now? Compare the relative affluence of the average family in the 1970s (square footage of housing, number of cars, number of TV sets, calories consumed, flights taken, % of homes with air conditioning, etc. – use whatever measure you like) to a family now, and by any measure the average family has far, far more “stuff” now. It’s not even close. And that doesn’t even measure that the material goods now are far better (compare a 2021 car to a 1971 car) or didn’t even exist back then (e.g., cell phones, personal computers, certain vaccines or other health care innovations, etc.).
If, as you say, the average American’s standard of living hasn’t increased in 50 years, why does the average American have far more, and better, material goods now?