<p>I very much like that the author of the article is drawing attention to the most pressing issue in higher education right now - socioeconomic diversity. When the affirmative action ‘wars’ started decades ago, those in favor of it often asserted something along the lines ‘giving a leg up to those who never had the opportunity’ and so on. The problem has been that most of the minority students at elite colleges have been well-to-do anyway, which defeats the main argument for AA.</p>
<p>Now, we’re seeing a different trend, which is why he’s dead-wrong when he asserts that “With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous.” The elite schools have, for a few years now, focused more and more effort on changing that and as a result are becoming less homogeneous. Most of these elite schools do extensive recruiting among less-privileged high schools; for example, every top-10 school in US News except one is a partner college of QuestBridge (and most of the top-20 schools are as well), which has literally tens of thousands of links to low-income students via high school counselors and teachers. As a result of such activities, the proportion of students from the lowest economic bracket have steadily increased: at HYPSM, that number is around 15-20% of Pell Grant students in recent admitted classes, among the highest in the nation. A similar proportion are first-generation college students.</p>
<p>The spotlight has been on socioeconomic diversity for a few years now, and we’ve seen drastic changes in the makeup of the elite schools’ student bodies. And because of their enhanced financial aid initiatives, more middle-income students are able to attend, making these campuses less frequently the breeding grounds for privilege and wealth. The result is that students of different ‘classes’ (I hate using that word) necessarily interact more.</p>
<p>So I think what he calls a disadvantage has very much turned into an advantage: regardless of how much income and class are discussed on these campuses, students are continually exposed to people who grew up in a different socioeconomic environment, and the ultimate conclusion they make is that there’s really no difference in what kind of people they are. Your class doesn’t define you or your friends, or how intelligent you are, or how successful you can be.</p>
<p>In my experience (not at an Ivy but the author would condemn it anyway), I met many a ‘rich’ student - sons and daughters of investment bankers, famous actors, venture capitalists, politicians. Although I came from a very underprivileged background (read: “poor as dirt”), it made no difference in my interactions with them. They made no assumptions about me and treated me no differently upon finding out my background. (In fact if anyone were making assumptions, it was me - assuming that they’d be snooty enough to treat me differently.) </p>
<p>The author’s fundamental error is that he assumes there’s a “way” to talk to people of different classes. Even if there is, the problem at these schools would not be because of an unwillingness to interact with people of ‘lower’ classes, as the author suggests. As far as I’ve seen, that problem isn’t present at the elite schools who make an effort to have socioeconomically diverse student bodies: students of different backgrounds are able to interact without any difficulty.</p>
<p>This isn’t to say there isn’t more work to be done. But the author definitely overstates the extent of this problem at the elite schools and seems to have a somewhat outdated experience. A study done nearly 10 years ago showed that 74% of the students at the top 146 colleges are from the top economic quartile, and only 3% are from the bottom. While I don’t think those numbers are very different today, I’m quite confident that they are very different specifically at the elite schools that the author is condemning.</p>