If a plutocracy seems to be working well, do we let it be? Human nature is such that plutocrats, by and large, will try to benefit their own, at the expense of others. Society will break and drift apart gradually, leading to eventual shocks with unpredictable outcomes.
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^ Sounds about right.
That’s also the history of the entire universe. I don’t think plutocrats have much to do with it in the bigger scope. It is human nature.
If you try to make a complex system fair by making it more complex, the people with the resources will figure out how to take advantage of the new system better than the people without. It is a law of unintended consequences.
Then congratulations are due to the Europeans, who seem to have figured out how to have an outstanding university system far less elitist than ours and with more mobility as well.
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In this regard, I’m perfectly happy to let Europe be Europe. I’ll take our college system (warts and all) over the European model any day. We are different - Vive la defference!
Some random thoughts reading all of this:
- My grandmother and all of her siblings were first-generation American children of Jewish immigrants from what is now Belorus and Poland. Their parents had no more than primary education, and spoke English with difficulty, although their father had business success (not on a large scale). She went to Radcliffe, and all three of her brothers went to Harvard, during the period in which we now know Harvard was using all sorts of means to avoid admitting too many Jews. None of them ever felt Harvard had discriminated against them; they worshiped Harvard. They certainly believed Harvard had opened up worlds to them.
It may be fair to criticize Harvard and its ilk for not opening up enough worlds for enough people from disfavored groups. But there’s a huge difference between what Harvard did for my forebears and total exclusion or failure to provide any benefit.
- A number of posters seem to think that the only meaningful associative value for low-SES students at a place like Harvard would be to sit at the table with the children of the ultra-rich and to catch the crumbs that fell from the rich kids' plates (metaphorically). When I look at my own experience at similar institutions with perfect hindsight, the really valuable associations were not so much with the few ultra-rich kids. The ultra-rich kids, with a few exceptions, grew up to be comfortable, rich adults, but not movers and shakers (and people who dragged a lot of their friends with them). The people who turned out to be great to know were mainly ambitious, but solidly middle class or upper middle class kids -- maybe top quartile in terms of family income, but not necessarily at all top 1%, much less top 0.1%.
That’s probably true everywhere, of course, not just Harvard, etc. There are network advantages everywhere smart, hardworking kids get to live and work together.
Stanford property is exempt from paying property taxes, including taxes on an 18 hole golf course that is used primarily by alumni. Exempt from tens of millions in taxes annually.
These extremely wealthy institutions that give preferences to the wealthy legacies and donors, do so at the expense of the regular folk who have to pay the property taxes to support services that benefit the wealthy university.
Stanford (and other private universities) do not pay income taxes either.
Yet Stanford has more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 50%.
Private universities can do what they like with regard to admissions. But…it seems to me that the tax codes could be revised so that they no longer get these tax breaks. There is no reason why the rest of America’s taxpayers should in essence subsidize their elitist admissions practices.
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I doubt reading this thread will cause anyone to change his/her mind. Most of what that is said here is opinion, so here’s mine on a few key points.
When elite schools admit more lower SES and URM kids, the group whose share of the pie is reduced most is NOT “white suburban kids.” It’s Asian and Asian-American kids, which is why this is the group that brought the lawsuit.
White suburban kids benefit enormously from athletic recruiting at the Ivies. With the exception of 3-4 teams, they make up a very large percentage of most sports teams at H and other top schools that don’t give athletic scholarships. Moreover, all of the Ivies have a problem with recruited athletes who quit the sport quickly. It’s anecdotal, I admit, but I think suburban white kids are more prone to do this than the few inner city URMs or the prep school athletes. (A school like Duke doesn’t have this problem because it gives athletic scholarships.)
There are a few teams which have a disproportionate number of African-Americans, e.g. football. There are also a couple of sports like squash that have lots of prep school grads and internationals. Most of the rest are disproportionately white and suburban.I’m not saying that everyone on most of the teams is a white suburban kid. I’m just saying that athletic recruiting at colleges which don’t give athletic scholarships disproportionately benefits this group.
As for how much less affluent kids mingle with the wealthy…yes, there are wealthy kids who attend these schools who choose to associate only with kids they already know from prep school and other social circles. But guess what? That happens at public flagships too. I suggest reading “Paying for the Party,” which is about a very thinly veiled Indiana U. One conclusion of “Paying for the Party” was that IU does–or did at the time the book was researched–a horrible job of helping its poorest students into the middle class. BTW, if you want to know where the wealthy send their “not at all academic” kids, look at IU. It enrolls a disproportionate percentage of the children of corporate high flyers and they isolate themselves in Greek houses made up of people like them.
Look at the Bush twins. Barbara went to Yale and she had at least one very close friend who was from the lowest SES quintile. She had many more middle class friends. Jenna went to UTexas-A, where she lived in a sorority made up of the daughters of the Texas elite and, based on hearsay, she rarely socialized outside the top Greek houses.
At EVERY college, there are lower SES kids who don’t want to socialize with rich kids. Years ago, there was an article in a New Haven newspaper about a poor white girl from Virginia who chose Yale over UVa because she got better financial aid from Yale. Her freshman year she ended up rooming with the daughter of Jane Pauley and Tom Brokaw. The girls did not become friends and did not room together after their first year. The girl from Virginia’s closest friends at Yale were the dining hall workers. (She did her work-study in the dining hall.) When I read the article, I actually felt sorry for the Brokaw kid because it was obvious she’d really tried hard to befriend her roommate, who had a chip on her shoulder from the first day.
There are rich kids who don’t want to socialize beyond their bubble. There are also people who are uncomfortable socializing with people much more affluent than they are. A few of these are guilty of violating the “Thou Shall Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Goods” commandment. As soon as they see a Prada purse or Canadian Goose jacket or diamond stud earrings or whatever is in, decide that the owner is a horrible person. They think people with these things shouldn’t wear them in public in front of people who can’t afford them.
Finally, a lot of people overestimate how qualified their kids are. They think their kids are outstanding because they are in their community. But outstanding in the community and outstanding nationally are 2 different things.
Income mobility, in percentiles, is approximately a zero sum game. For everyone that moves up a quintile, someone else needs to move down a quintile.
The people who work at those universities do. Often a college is a major or even primary source of income taxes - both directly from its employees and from all the jobs it creates in the community.
I live in a college town and though we don’t get the property taxes, we sure do get the income taxes. This town wouldn’t exist in anything like its present form without the college.
“plutocrats, by and large, will try to benefit their own, at the expense of others.”
How do the Ivies benefit their own AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS? Are, say, University of Maryland students, shut out of opportunities? If you go to the University of Virginia, are you doomed to a life of penury?
As someone who lived most of her life in the Western part of the US, I am baffled by the fixation that East Coast families have on these schools. It seems to be downright antediluvian thinking to me.
In terms of relative ranking, yes.
However, in terms of absolute levels, not necessarily. Some older generations had up to 90% having higher income than their parents – a largely positive sum game due to a combination of economic growth and wide distribution of the gains. But some later generations were looking at a more zero sum game, with only 50% doing better than their parents. It may even be a negative sum game for most* now, if most millennials are poorer than their parents were at the same age.
*But those who make it to the top see a positive sum game as economic gains get concentrated at the top.
Not quite correct. During its last expansion, Stanford gave the Palo Alto School district a bunch of money to help pay for the additional kids resulting from the expansion.
Note, most/nearly all of Stanford is not in the Palo Alto city limits; it’s in the adjacent county to which Stanford pays some serious cash. In fact, Stanford just recently proposed to to pay another $138M to PAUSD and over $1B to the County in transportation improvements to be able to buildout some grad dorms (to get students onto campus) and expand ther programs.
So Stanford voluntarily donated to the local public schools teaching the kids of its faculty and staff and for needed transportation for its own students. While I suppose such largesse is better than nothing, it is also self-serving.
^^in the big picture, aren’t pretty much all property taxes “self-serving”?
Millennials aren’t worse off than their parents. If you had a time machine and offered Millennials a chance to go back and live in the 80s or early 90s, before smart phones, the internet, Netflix/Amazon, Pandora/Spotify, and ultra-high definition TVs, I think you would get approximately zero takers. No sane person would trade today’s medical care for what was available three decades ago.
I don’t understand the taxes argument. Stanford does a lot for the community. In addition to very generous financial aid (isn’t that helping “Regular folk” at the expense of “rich folk?”), it runs a hospital and many other community services. It is a hub for innovation and research. The economy around Palo Alto would be profoundly different (worse) without Stanford. A guess, but I am thinking the county is willing to forego the taxes for the upside Stanford brings ti the table.
I also don’t understand why people seem to think there are card carrying plutocrats out there twirling their Plutocrat mustaches at their annual Plutocrat Association of America conferences , plotting to keep out the rabble from attending Plutocrat University. There is no conspiracy. There is just a supply and demand problem.
Unless s/he could afford what was available three decades ago but cannot afford it now.
Of course, there is also starting working life without as much student loan debt (and without being as much of a college cost burden on one’s parents). Or not needing as high (expensive) educational credentials for entry level jobs in many areas.
@jonri C’mon, you know better than to the actually see this in terms of “the poor little misunderstood rich kids”. Poor kids who attend a rich school often feel alienated and alone, because they don’t have “their people”.
Not only “a few” rich kids grow up in a bubble, most of them do. They do not live in the same communities, go to the same schools, or shop in the same stores as the middle class and the poor.
Consequently, they often do not know how to behave with kids from other socioeconomic classes. They’re not snubbing poor kids, or treating them badly, they simply have no idea how to communicate with them.
The same goes for the poor kids. Poverty creates a bubble as well, a more extreme one. They are no better communicating with rich kids than rich kids are at communicating with poor kids. That girl from Virginia did not speak the same language as Tom Brokaw’s daughter. She did speak the same language as the cafeteria workers.
In this lack of communication, the poor kids suffer more. Rich kids who attend “elite” schools have been told their entire life that they are special, that they are the “elite”. These are the kids who were the smartest in their elite school, the kids who were considered the elite in “elite” schools.
The poor kids who make it to there are, at best, told that they have a chance not to grow up poor. They are also told by many that they are worthless because they’re poor.
Poor kids have impostor syndrome on a level far beyond that of rich kids. Read the posts of poor kids going to “elite” schools. They’re scared, they’re worried that other kids will make fun of them because of their background, that every mistake that they make will cause them to be rejected, etc. They’re not being unfriendly because of jealousy, they feel alienated from the kids around them.
This can sometimes come out as aggressive unfriendly behavior, because kids are not good at dealing with their feelings.
When poor kids find “their people”, or come with them, they are not only better at dealing with wealthy kids, they are better at negotiating the world of “elite” colleges.
PS. Do you realize how classicist it sounds when you speak of the girl befriending the cafeteria workers as though this was a negative thing? The cafeteria workers are not “The Help”, the lower class servants that the girl should shun if she wants to “fit in” with the “upper class” kids, such as Tom Brokaw’s daughter.
Maybe she befriended the cafeteria workers because she isn’t a privileged, entitled rich kid who looks down on the cafeteria workers as their inferiors.
It is certainly possible for Stanford to continue to run a college and hospital, and employ people, and pay taxes. It isnt an either/or proposition.
It is inexplicable why private universities with billions in endowment funds and who primarily educate children of the wealthy elites don’t have to pay any income taxes or property taxes.