As a Bridge Black, I say "No thank you." It is EXHAUSTING. As I told the white parents at my daughter's former elementary school here in liberal Brooklyn, Black and Brown people aren't here to provide a diverse educational experience for your children.
"I would love to see people be more open about how most students aren’t at an elite college because of their own efforts, but because of a combination of effort, opportunity, and privilege, with privilege having both individual and structural-level dimensions. Of course it’s awkward to draw attention to how structural forces have facilitated your success, but it’s also necessary to pull back the curtain on the forces that enabled your success."
This is *SO* well put -- not to get too off-topic, but I often think about the above in relation to certain highly prestigious and/or low-paying "passion" jobs. Like, congratulations on your debut novel, but what I really want to know is who/what supported you in that time-and-energy consuming, UNPAID endeavor: did you write on evenings/weekends after you got home from your 9-to-5? Did you get to be on your spouse's health insurance, or do you live in a home your parents financed/own and not have to pay rent? Did you secure some kind of fellowship funding (and what advantages did you have in that contest)? Same idea with start-ups. Who or what supported you before your business turned a profit? Where did your funding come from?
I guess in general (and maybe it's unbecoming of me!) I find it really frustrating how reluctant accomplished people often are to admit to their economic privilege. This idea of meritocracy and wanting everyone to think that your success comes from your own aptitude and "hard work," and bootstrapping, when in reality that's only one (maybe small!) piece of the puzzle is, I think, really misleading and discouraging for folks who then think they're "not good enough" because they lack advantages they don't even know you had. And that kids (they are kids!!) have to navigate this dynamic just to get into college...ugh, what a mindfuck.
I suspect that not admitting one’s economic privilege functions as a defense mechanism more often than some would like to admit. It was particularly obvious to me when Hollywood nepo babies treat someone pointing out their connections as an attack on their talent.
If those lucrative gigs weren’t gatekept so strictly by hoping someone in a position of power will notice an aspiring actor’s “hard work,” there’d be more competition for those benefitting from the status quo.
There’s also a psychological dynamic where even at the best high schools only 25% of students or whatever make it into the super selective universities, so they look around and think “what are you talking about, I beat out a ton of my classmates, who were all trying for this and had all of the same advantages, I rule.” And they’re not totally wrong about that, but the game they won was still much, much easier than the game others were playing in a way that’s a lot more complex to understand.
As a parent to white upper middle class kids who have ancestors with lots of letters after their last name and who is deeply invested in the equity conversation...
I have thoughts
1...My kids' education at their supposedly awesome white Cleveland suburbs school is a joke. My 9th grader is doing 6th grade worksheets. They are asking questions like how did the native Americans benefit from westward expansion and the word "genocide" is not in the curriculum. How on EARTH is this kid gonna cope when he has to write an actual history paper in college?
2...I have gone to name brand schools, community college, my terminal degree is from UGA and I am an adjunct at a Very Big Name University in a masters degree program. I went to a very average, very white HS in Fairfield County CT and graduated in the early 90s. I have seen a lot of educational institutions. And frankly many of my students who went to state schools as out of state students are simply more in debt. My students who have name brand educations are usually better writers and are more at ease with the idea that I make them start with blank pieces of paper and vague directions (which frankly, is life). All of them have this idea that I should tell them exactly what to do to get an A. On every assignment. And they are petrified of getting it wrong even though I allow unlimited rewrites...which is also life in my particular subject area.
3. No way in hell am I paying for a 4 year degree before my kids prove themselves at community college. To me, it is actually what I got in HS. Happily a lot of places have co-enrollment with the local CC when you are in HS. Spending family resources for a traditional college experience seems like something that is mostly serving the parents?
4. I suspect it is up to parents like me to let our little darlings be mediocre. This idea that college is the great equalizer has little merit. My boys are gonna ahead because they are white and upper middle class and my daughter is gonna have to work twice as hard to get into a school half as "good" because she is white and upper middle class (see this weekend's NYT and everything @Richard Reeves writes).
Time to chuck it in the %$#@ it bucket. Meritocracy is a joke and has allowed trillions of wealth transfer upwards. I refuse to participate any more than I have to.
Our current system simply allows all the advantages of a college education to coagulate on the people who already have all the advantages
ooof I relate to this. My husband and I went to a veeeerrrry poor high school in WV back in the late 90s. Our prep for college was....lacking. Today I have a PhD and my husband is an upper-level something-to-do-with-tech worker at a Fortune 50 company.
I think the difference is that the good teachers in this environment (and our parents) taught us to BE CURIOUS. Learning isn't some bullshit hoop to leap through to get your degree. It legitimately makes your life better. It enriches you. It's FUN. And if it's a 2 hour drive to the nearest bookstore or movie theater you learn quick how to amuse yourself.
Meanwhile now I'm watching friends more than double their housing costs to put their pre-K children in the "good" school district. And all I can think is that we're redoing the student loan crisis all over again, only now when little Johnny is 6, not 18.
I'm not sure if you can have this discussion without talking about the University of Michigan and the northeast, because my impression is that UM started targeting rich kids from the NYC area 35+ years ago, was incredibly successful, and built the template for this strategy (and put UM so far down this road that people don't even remark on it anymore). UM enrolls roughly half its class from out of state and charges tuition that's basically the same as a high-end private. This has been true since at least the early aughts when I was applying and it was conventional wisdom that the story was (1) Michigan used to be a rich state and built a fancy public university (look at all these gothic buildings!) (2) then the economy collapsed (see, e.g., Detroit) so state funding collapsed and the University ]adopted the business model of the Ivy League (but sells it as more fun because it's a big school with a good football team etc.). Fast forward a few decades and now there are tons of UM grads in elite NY/NJ etc. circles (they also invested in their law school etc., which ranks up with the elite privates and gives them a second shot at those networks). There are a lot of wealthy NYC families on their second generation of sending kids to Ann Arbor.
The reason that UM did this is very well told (it might even be true), but the story of the students has always been the more interesting piece to me. I went to a well regarded prep school in the early aughts and UM was one of a handful of publics that were always on our radar (UVA, Berkley, and UCLA were the others, also UVM for stoners--Phish, very popular at my high school). I've always had the impression that this was all downstream of the Ivies getting much more competitive--the comment from the Dartmouth alum above was pretty revealing to me. In the 60s my high school would have sent *most* of our grads to Ivies or elite SLACS, but those days were long gone and then (and now) schools like mine brag about getting 15%-20% of their class into those schools.
That created a huge opportunity for other schools to enroll a bunch of rich kids who had just been through a pretty rigorous college prep curriculum. The next tier of privates (Tufts, WashU, BC, etc.) stepped in to capitalize in a big way and have been very successful at doing so, but local publics were totally unprepared to serve that constituency. NY and NJ publics had a terrible reputation at the time so affluent families barely considered them (this was the era when NJ seemed to give up on Rutgers altogether and rebrand TCNJ as an elite local option--I think they've revered course and are now trying to turn Rutgers New Brunswick into a midwest-style flagship; to this day there are fierce debates as to which of the SUNY campuses is the "good one," officially I think it's both Buffalo and Albany, but Stony Brook and Binghamton also have partisans). I think this is a legacy of the dynamic I mentioned before, local rich kids mostly went to Ivies so there was never any need to build an elite public, but it created a giant market opportunity and UM seems to me like it was the first public to capitalize. And now you can get UM alumni license plates in both NY and NJ:
UA and others are clearly moving into the market, but they've got a long way to go to get to "alumni license plate available six states away" levels of success in this game. (Also, more relevantly, UM is charging the out of staters 65k in tuition and then another 15k in room and board while UA is cutting out of state students deals on tuition.)
This is going on at Madison, too. We live in MN, and have reciprocity with WI and ND, so both states are popular choices. Many parents and kids are hoping for Madison because of the reputation, but in the last few years we've noticed a lot more rejections for students who are accepted at many other Big 10 schools, including our son. He got into the school he wanted, but the rejection was a blow for him and just about all his friends, and even kids of alumni (one had both parents as grads and a sister currently attending. There went their donations, lol).
Yeah Madison definitely seems to be climbing up this ladder. One thing that interests me is the totally different perceptions that my wife (from Illinois, middle class background) and I (from NJ, PMC background) had of Big10 schools in particular. To me it was “obvious” that Michigan and Northwestern were in a class by themselves, whereas she thought U of I and Madison were right at the top of the list. Madison seems to be bridging that divide, though Illinois doesn’t seem to have broken through in the East yet.
As a U of IL grad, school pride insists that U of I rules (ILL, INI!). But I can admit that despite my Wolverine dislike (sorry) Northwestern and Michigan are usually acknowledged as the top Big 10 schools academically overall. Madison was always popular, but had more of a party reputation, at least when I was younger, because 18 year olds could legally drink at the time (I think we were grandfathered in?) It’s this kind of state rivalry that will now be lost, imo, now that the Big 10 will be what, 18? How can you have a rivalry when your high school friends don’t come in to see your team vs their team (my freshmen year we absolutely trounced Michigan and went to the Rose Bowl, so we had it all over our high school friends at other schools)? Do I really care if we beat Rutgers? And there are so many cups/plaques/rivalry game names that just won’t happen with the addition of new schools. But that’s a different topic, I suppose!
It's also very field dependent, my wife was applying to engineering schools, where U of I is very much one of the top schools in the country but was a world that was totally alien to me.
Yes! Native Michigander here who was also applying in early aughts. Frankly was shocked by number of out of state UM grads in DMV where I lived post college for 10+ years. Seems the trickle down theory from ivies is true - at least based on my interactions with those grads.
Yup, from the Northeast, work with a lot of "elite school" types, and Michigan is definitely clumped in with "top schools" outside of Ivies. (I also happen to come from a long-line of NJ residents going to UMich dating back to the '30s-'40s... but that obviously pre-dates this trend! Though Rutgers being a teaching college back in the day and NJ not having many good in-state options definitely contributed even then.)
One interesting point that is, I think, alluded to here but overlooked: NY's state university system lacks prestige, and that is a huge driver of those kids, particularly, going out of state (from an UM C background). SUNY has great schools, but they have zero name recognition, and for someone who can pay full freight, that feels like a poor tradeoff compared to sending their kid to an OSU, UMD, etc., where those powerful alum networks exist, plus the other things that replicate the college experiences of their parents or the idealized version they want their kids to experience (football, Greek life, campuses that are lovely and historic).
That's been true since I was growing up in these suburbs of NYC 20+ years ago, and it's even more true now, if only based on the published college committments of our local seniors.
SUNY also doesn't have an agreed upon flagship, which I think has really hurt their ability to tap this market (I guess from an academic standpoint the fancy part of SUNY is half of Cornell, but that's a weird dynamic all on its own). I think that leads to a situation where affluent students looking for a "college experience" perceive even the big flagship-ish SUNY campuses as being regional or commuter schools that aren't what they're looking for.
The thing that is so interesting about this is that, realistically, most students don't need to go to places with prestige names and often would be better off going somewhere less expensive. Most of us will end up doing jobs that we don't get because we went somewhere fancy. I work in higher ed and I can't tell you where the majority of my staff went because it doesn't actually matter to me in terms of ability to tell if they'll be able to do their job. I suspect most jobs are like that.
So many great points in this interview. Suburban Boston UMC parent whose son is at University of Maryland. He went to a STEM high school, and one of the best pieces of advice that his guidance counselors gave his class was to look beyond Massachusetts for colleges to increase your chance of being accepted. The pool of graduating seniors in any given year in Massachusetts is very strong. He is a smart kid, but didn't have exceptional grades. We don't qualify for financial aid, but in our minds, the value UMD offers for out-of-state tuition is excellent. It's a top-notch school, and for his major, top 10 nationwide.
I appreciate the insight into Southern Greek life - the socioeconomics and culture of it all. It makes my and my family's hair stand on end. The privilege and selectivity reminds me of the eating clubs at Princeton, where I spent many years as a financially struggling graduate student.
The benefit to the universities for out-of state students seems akin to how private colleges and universities love international students who pay tuition in full.
I love that this interview came from a UMD professor. When I was getting accepted into colleges in 2013, I applied to UMD because it was my state school. In theory, I definitely should have gotten in, but UMD was fond of the partial rejection at the time (they may still do this!) where they reject you for fall semester, but accept you for spring semester. You are actually still welcome to take classes in the fall, but you can’t live on campus and you have no access to a meal plan or anything like that. We speculated back then that it was because they were trying to admit more out-of-state students, and lo and behold! That seems to be the case! Really fascinating interview here. Thanks AHP!
Wow, that is super interesting - baking in a pipeline of in-state to backfill the bit of attrition after one semester. They must have known approx how many beds they’d have open after fall and that’s a good way to ensure they get the full year of room/board. I am assuming (but perhaps incorrectly) that if you were welcome to take classes that first term is was as a non-matriculating student, therefore with no FAFSA review and no merit-based aid?
(tl dr, Black kids from California are getting long-acting birth control before heading to HBCUs in the South with restrictive state-level abortion policies)
Are the affluent white kids heading to Bama doing the same, with this level of frankness? Or do they and their parents assume they can come home easily enough if they have an unwanted pregnancy? I'm guessing the latter but I wonder if this kind of preparation is happening in this demographic as well. Is it a topic of conversation amongst parents?
Interesting point. I'm in a huge FB parent group for high school-college-after college and when Roe was overturned there was a lot of mentions about it whenever someone brought up a Southern school. Politics aren't allowed on the page, and comments had to be cut off on multiple posts. One mother, I remember, was like so what, my kid isn't going to live there, what do I care what the laws of the state are? And when informed that accidents happen, was like that doesn't concern me, as if to say 'not my kid'. I'm going with; daughter flies home, has an abortion, attends class online until she can travel back. "I had a family event".
I don’t have a subscription anymore, but the NYT published a really eye opening upshot piece maybe 7-8 years ago using tax record data to analyze how much money student’s parents made for universities across the country and how much of their student body was in the top 1%, 10%, 25%. I went to UIUC as an in state student. It had a pretty high amount of wealthy kids 50% students from top 20%, mainly north shore and west suburb kids. But it wasn’t nearly as bad as UMichigan. I found the article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-colleges-have-more-students-from-the-top-1-percent-than-the-bottom-60.html
[Anecdote related to that nyt report: I come from a very wealthy background - I know, not cool to admit on AHP substack or anywhere really. I looked at University of Colorado Boulder, CSU, UDenver, Colorado College because I was obsessed w living in Colorado at the time. One of my parent’s friends ran into us at the Denver airport after visiting schools there. He said, “Oh, at Colorado College you can split the student body by which are from the 1% vs the rest.” It was similar at UDenver. The more I thought about it the more I couldn’t stomach going to school being in a bubble like that. I didn’t want my parents paying what was like $60k a year at the time for having mountains in the background and ski trips on weekends and being with a bunch of other wealthy kids. Colorado College had like 25% per that report students from 1% families which is nuts.]
That report might have also included % students who went to public high schools vs private vs home schooled. The % at Ivy league is nuts compared to even selective land grant public schools like the big state schools.
Malcolm Gladwell, who I know over simplifies things and irritates academics and is viewed as blase in some circles, had a really excellent podcast episode about university’s outcomes in terms of income brackets. He compared two universities, one that prioritized enrolling lower income students and the other that pursued wealthy students and poured money into expensive amenities like gourmet food in the cafeteria. https://omny.fm/shows/revisionist-history/food-fight
It really pushed me to think about if I have kids in the future that university choices can have a social justice component. No one lives in a vacuum.
FWIW, I think it *is* cool to admit that you come from a very wealthy background! Per my comment upthread, I wish more people were transparent about their privilege. Personally, I imagine that part of the reason (how significant a part, I'll never know) I got into the school I did was that I didn't apply for any financial aid. I don't think that diminishes how qualified I was, but I think it's only fair to admit that in a veritable sea of applicants with similar test scores and grades, the fact that my tuition was paid in full probably moved the needle.
I'm a parent of a recent college grad (from a smaller offshoot of a Big 10 school, not Greek) and a current college Junior (Big 10 school, Greek) so college admissions and Greek life is my zone right now. My husband and I also attended different Big 10 schools and were Greek in the mid 80s.
I'm originally from Chicago, so OSU is popular there, and we had our current Junior apply (as a backup, sorry). It wasn't really 'known' in our state, he was the only one of his friends applying, although this year 4-5 boys we know are going there. They gave a good amount of money, but he really wanted the school he chose, which was also out of state, and gave a tiny amount, which was better than nothing. We don't qualify for aid, which is appropriate.
My a friend who still lives in a fancy North Shore suburb of Chicago has been telling me for YEARS about how many kids go South because of the money they are given, that it's practically in state rates, although travel and Greek life bring the costs back up.
My Junior's school has also become more East Coast over the years, due to the popularity of one of the majors (not Madison or Michigan, which were always popular on the East Coast), and although I don't think it's affected him socially, some of the fraternities have definitely changed from Midwest based to East Coast based. I'm trying to be a little vague, lol.
And I've said before, but being Jewish also makes me side eye some of the Southern schools, even though I know there are plenty of Jews in the South and at these schools. I do remember a friend telling me that when she was in college in the South in the 80s, she didn't rush because the house she wanted "already had their Jewish girl". And someone commented previously that my sorority, SDT, doesn't participate in rush at UA, I assume because it's predominately Jewish and rushes are not.
I grew up in a tiny midwestern town, was a first generation college student, and went to a community college for two years before transferring because my parents didn’t have the financial resources to help me with college.(Which was fine, it was the mid-90s and while I felt like I carried a lot of debt from school, it was NOTHING compared to what people carry today. And I think I valued my eduction more because I was paying for it, I was highly motivated to finish my undergrad in four years.) I do not have kids. Reading essays like this reminds me about how little I know about this other world. I’m also reminded of something pointed out in the article, how these sorts of systems continue to reinforce economic - and racial - hierarchies and what the consequences of that are. Lots to chew on this Sunday morning.
This train of articles has been weirdly applicable in my life. I work for the University of Georgia and have since 2012....the bewildering shift, especially in the past 3 years to accommodate the influx of wealthy students (well, students with wealthy moms and dads) has been weird to watch. What's worse is that I primarily work with the post-grad crowd (grad students, postdocs, med/vet students, etc) who most definitely cannot afford the pricy student housing (now with dog spas! AHP should look into the new line of student property amenities, it's a trip).
On the other hand of this....I'm a B.S and PhD grad from West Virginia University. Yes, they of the "lets-nuke-the-humanities-because-really-do-they-make-that-much-money-anyway?" fame. So I'm bouncing between "dog-spa-levels of wealth" at UGA, and McSweeny's joke articles about academic penny pinching at WVU.
and one month later - the WV board of governors voted to approve the cuts. 28 majors and 143 faculty positions. 1/3 of the education department and the entire world language department. Even my own STEM-focused major (BS Chemistry) is making cuts.
One thing that’s interesting to me about UA (and I’m curious about Auburn’s numbers as the other big state school) versus UGA, where 82% of the class of 2023 are in state students, is the role that the state lottery has played on admissions. When I went to college at UGA the HOPE Scholarship was brand new. It ensured that any high school senior with a 3.0 who got in to a state school could attend tuition free as long as they maintained a 3.0. The standards have changed now--it’s harder to get and I’m not sure it’s as generous--but my understanding is that it’s largely responsible for propelling UGA into the status of respected flagship academic institution like UVA, UM, and UNC. And it also ensured a diverse and largely in state population. I grew up 15 minutes from the Alabama border and I remember when Alabama was voting on a lottery in maybe 2000 or 2002 (it failed) and the pro lottery group ran an ad with students sitting around wearing UGA gear saying “thank you, Alabama!” because of all the Alabama residents who bought tickets that funded the educations of Georgia residents.
This, I came here to say exactly this. I am from Georgia and went out of state for undergrad, but came back and availed myself of the extremely reasonably priced tuition for law school, and I have no regrets (especially since the law school is now ranked in the top 20). The lottery made UGA a FANTASTIC and affordable school that many more high achieving Georgia kids chose to attend instead of going to more "prestigious" private and/or out of state schools, and so schools like Alabama, Clemson, etc. benefitted by being able to recruit Georgia kids who couldn't get into a suddenly very competitive UGA and were faced with choosing another state's flagship school or a smaller Georgia school like Valdosta State or Georgia Southern. Along with the state's Pre-K program, the HOPE Scholarship is a masterclass in how to use your state's lottery funding to do amazing things to benefit students.
My sister went out of state and then to UGA for law school, too! I always kind of wish I’d gone somewhere smaller (and am encouraging my kids to look at small schools, too), but I’m also really proud of the reputation Georgia has now.
I have a question that jumped out at me as I was reading this post, although my thoughts are not well-formed, so forgive me. All of this out-of-state recruiting, does this have any ulterior motives as related to voting? I know I’ve read things about troubles related to college IDs, where a college student is allowed to vote... if colleges are actively recruiting like this (and it’s working), how does it bode for these kids being able to vote in various elections? Does it make it more complicated? Impossible? Etc...
Having worked in higher ed (including doing admissions work for a long time), I don't think this is really a driver. It's much more about the need for people to pay out of state tuition.
When I was at UGA for vet school in the early 2000s the voting in Clarke County was a MESS.
It was an open secret that they wanted the white kids from the surrounding counties to go to UGA and register to vote in Clarke County to dilute the black vote.
I always voted by absentee ballot when I was in college (thanks to my parents, it wasn't high on my list) and we do the same for our kids. There was some loophole in WI where students are able to vote in local elections even if they are not state residents (I don't remember the details) and my daughter's campus (Eau Claire) had one of the highest county turnouts last fall. I'll bet they try to change that for 2024.
One thing I think is important to add for context is that the decision for public schools to increase their out of state enrollment didn't just come from no where or because there are a bunch of greedy administrators trying to make more money... it's a direct result of state legislatures scaling (sometimes dramatically) the amount of state investment in higher education. State funding of public higher ed is down everywhere (but worse in red states) and public universities get slammed for trying to raise tuition on in-state students (they still do, but many legislatures will limit their ability to increase tuition more than a few percentage points a year) but nobody raises an alarm about increasing costs for out of state students. Recruiting more out of state students is a pragmatic (though not unproblematic) response to systematic state disinvestment in higher ed.
Also, it is worth remembering that most colleges admit most of their applicants, most of the time. We focus a disproportionate amount of our media coverage and parental angst on the schools that are largely outliers in their selectivity.
Fascinating conversation. At my daughter’s orientation at University of Oregon half the auditorium was from California. Apparently “UC Oregon” is how they’re referring to UO now. I guess they’re flocking (hehe) to UO because getting accepted at UC schools is nearly impossible, even as a community college transfer. UC Santa Cruz is my alma mater but there’s no way I’d get accepted now.
Oh, and our anecdotal story suggests that out of state recruitment provides instate financial benefits. Both my kids received a Pathway scholarship, which covers all tuition and fees for anyone who is in state, qualifies for a Pell grant, and has a 3.2 gpa. I’m sure this program rides on the wallets of those Californian out of state tuition payers.
As a Bridge Black, I say "No thank you." It is EXHAUSTING. As I told the white parents at my daughter's former elementary school here in liberal Brooklyn, Black and Brown people aren't here to provide a diverse educational experience for your children.
"I would love to see people be more open about how most students aren’t at an elite college because of their own efforts, but because of a combination of effort, opportunity, and privilege, with privilege having both individual and structural-level dimensions. Of course it’s awkward to draw attention to how structural forces have facilitated your success, but it’s also necessary to pull back the curtain on the forces that enabled your success."
This is *SO* well put -- not to get too off-topic, but I often think about the above in relation to certain highly prestigious and/or low-paying "passion" jobs. Like, congratulations on your debut novel, but what I really want to know is who/what supported you in that time-and-energy consuming, UNPAID endeavor: did you write on evenings/weekends after you got home from your 9-to-5? Did you get to be on your spouse's health insurance, or do you live in a home your parents financed/own and not have to pay rent? Did you secure some kind of fellowship funding (and what advantages did you have in that contest)? Same idea with start-ups. Who or what supported you before your business turned a profit? Where did your funding come from?
I guess in general (and maybe it's unbecoming of me!) I find it really frustrating how reluctant accomplished people often are to admit to their economic privilege. This idea of meritocracy and wanting everyone to think that your success comes from your own aptitude and "hard work," and bootstrapping, when in reality that's only one (maybe small!) piece of the puzzle is, I think, really misleading and discouraging for folks who then think they're "not good enough" because they lack advantages they don't even know you had. And that kids (they are kids!!) have to navigate this dynamic just to get into college...ugh, what a mindfuck.
I suspect that not admitting one’s economic privilege functions as a defense mechanism more often than some would like to admit. It was particularly obvious to me when Hollywood nepo babies treat someone pointing out their connections as an attack on their talent.
If those lucrative gigs weren’t gatekept so strictly by hoping someone in a position of power will notice an aspiring actor’s “hard work,” there’d be more competition for those benefitting from the status quo.
There’s also a psychological dynamic where even at the best high schools only 25% of students or whatever make it into the super selective universities, so they look around and think “what are you talking about, I beat out a ton of my classmates, who were all trying for this and had all of the same advantages, I rule.” And they’re not totally wrong about that, but the game they won was still much, much easier than the game others were playing in a way that’s a lot more complex to understand.
As a parent to white upper middle class kids who have ancestors with lots of letters after their last name and who is deeply invested in the equity conversation...
I have thoughts
1...My kids' education at their supposedly awesome white Cleveland suburbs school is a joke. My 9th grader is doing 6th grade worksheets. They are asking questions like how did the native Americans benefit from westward expansion and the word "genocide" is not in the curriculum. How on EARTH is this kid gonna cope when he has to write an actual history paper in college?
2...I have gone to name brand schools, community college, my terminal degree is from UGA and I am an adjunct at a Very Big Name University in a masters degree program. I went to a very average, very white HS in Fairfield County CT and graduated in the early 90s. I have seen a lot of educational institutions. And frankly many of my students who went to state schools as out of state students are simply more in debt. My students who have name brand educations are usually better writers and are more at ease with the idea that I make them start with blank pieces of paper and vague directions (which frankly, is life). All of them have this idea that I should tell them exactly what to do to get an A. On every assignment. And they are petrified of getting it wrong even though I allow unlimited rewrites...which is also life in my particular subject area.
3. No way in hell am I paying for a 4 year degree before my kids prove themselves at community college. To me, it is actually what I got in HS. Happily a lot of places have co-enrollment with the local CC when you are in HS. Spending family resources for a traditional college experience seems like something that is mostly serving the parents?
4. I suspect it is up to parents like me to let our little darlings be mediocre. This idea that college is the great equalizer has little merit. My boys are gonna ahead because they are white and upper middle class and my daughter is gonna have to work twice as hard to get into a school half as "good" because she is white and upper middle class (see this weekend's NYT and everything @Richard Reeves writes).
Time to chuck it in the %$#@ it bucket. Meritocracy is a joke and has allowed trillions of wealth transfer upwards. I refuse to participate any more than I have to.
Our current system simply allows all the advantages of a college education to coagulate on the people who already have all the advantages
ooof I relate to this. My husband and I went to a veeeerrrry poor high school in WV back in the late 90s. Our prep for college was....lacking. Today I have a PhD and my husband is an upper-level something-to-do-with-tech worker at a Fortune 50 company.
I think the difference is that the good teachers in this environment (and our parents) taught us to BE CURIOUS. Learning isn't some bullshit hoop to leap through to get your degree. It legitimately makes your life better. It enriches you. It's FUN. And if it's a 2 hour drive to the nearest bookstore or movie theater you learn quick how to amuse yourself.
Meanwhile now I'm watching friends more than double their housing costs to put their pre-K children in the "good" school district. And all I can think is that we're redoing the student loan crisis all over again, only now when little Johnny is 6, not 18.
I'm not sure if you can have this discussion without talking about the University of Michigan and the northeast, because my impression is that UM started targeting rich kids from the NYC area 35+ years ago, was incredibly successful, and built the template for this strategy (and put UM so far down this road that people don't even remark on it anymore). UM enrolls roughly half its class from out of state and charges tuition that's basically the same as a high-end private. This has been true since at least the early aughts when I was applying and it was conventional wisdom that the story was (1) Michigan used to be a rich state and built a fancy public university (look at all these gothic buildings!) (2) then the economy collapsed (see, e.g., Detroit) so state funding collapsed and the University ]adopted the business model of the Ivy League (but sells it as more fun because it's a big school with a good football team etc.). Fast forward a few decades and now there are tons of UM grads in elite NY/NJ etc. circles (they also invested in their law school etc., which ranks up with the elite privates and gives them a second shot at those networks). There are a lot of wealthy NYC families on their second generation of sending kids to Ann Arbor.
The reason that UM did this is very well told (it might even be true), but the story of the students has always been the more interesting piece to me. I went to a well regarded prep school in the early aughts and UM was one of a handful of publics that were always on our radar (UVA, Berkley, and UCLA were the others, also UVM for stoners--Phish, very popular at my high school). I've always had the impression that this was all downstream of the Ivies getting much more competitive--the comment from the Dartmouth alum above was pretty revealing to me. In the 60s my high school would have sent *most* of our grads to Ivies or elite SLACS, but those days were long gone and then (and now) schools like mine brag about getting 15%-20% of their class into those schools.
That created a huge opportunity for other schools to enroll a bunch of rich kids who had just been through a pretty rigorous college prep curriculum. The next tier of privates (Tufts, WashU, BC, etc.) stepped in to capitalize in a big way and have been very successful at doing so, but local publics were totally unprepared to serve that constituency. NY and NJ publics had a terrible reputation at the time so affluent families barely considered them (this was the era when NJ seemed to give up on Rutgers altogether and rebrand TCNJ as an elite local option--I think they've revered course and are now trying to turn Rutgers New Brunswick into a midwest-style flagship; to this day there are fierce debates as to which of the SUNY campuses is the "good one," officially I think it's both Buffalo and Albany, but Stony Brook and Binghamton also have partisans). I think this is a legacy of the dynamic I mentioned before, local rich kids mostly went to Ivies so there was never any need to build an elite public, but it created a giant market opportunity and UM seems to me like it was the first public to capitalize. And now you can get UM alumni license plates in both NY and NJ:
https://dmv.ny.gov/plates/university-michigan
https://www.state.nj.us/mvc/vehicles/alumni.htm
UA and others are clearly moving into the market, but they've got a long way to go to get to "alumni license plate available six states away" levels of success in this game. (Also, more relevantly, UM is charging the out of staters 65k in tuition and then another 15k in room and board while UA is cutting out of state students deals on tuition.)
This is going on at Madison, too. We live in MN, and have reciprocity with WI and ND, so both states are popular choices. Many parents and kids are hoping for Madison because of the reputation, but in the last few years we've noticed a lot more rejections for students who are accepted at many other Big 10 schools, including our son. He got into the school he wanted, but the rejection was a blow for him and just about all his friends, and even kids of alumni (one had both parents as grads and a sister currently attending. There went their donations, lol).
Yeah Madison definitely seems to be climbing up this ladder. One thing that interests me is the totally different perceptions that my wife (from Illinois, middle class background) and I (from NJ, PMC background) had of Big10 schools in particular. To me it was “obvious” that Michigan and Northwestern were in a class by themselves, whereas she thought U of I and Madison were right at the top of the list. Madison seems to be bridging that divide, though Illinois doesn’t seem to have broken through in the East yet.
As a U of IL grad, school pride insists that U of I rules (ILL, INI!). But I can admit that despite my Wolverine dislike (sorry) Northwestern and Michigan are usually acknowledged as the top Big 10 schools academically overall. Madison was always popular, but had more of a party reputation, at least when I was younger, because 18 year olds could legally drink at the time (I think we were grandfathered in?) It’s this kind of state rivalry that will now be lost, imo, now that the Big 10 will be what, 18? How can you have a rivalry when your high school friends don’t come in to see your team vs their team (my freshmen year we absolutely trounced Michigan and went to the Rose Bowl, so we had it all over our high school friends at other schools)? Do I really care if we beat Rutgers? And there are so many cups/plaques/rivalry game names that just won’t happen with the addition of new schools. But that’s a different topic, I suppose!
It's also very field dependent, my wife was applying to engineering schools, where U of I is very much one of the top schools in the country but was a world that was totally alien to me.
Yes! Native Michigander here who was also applying in early aughts. Frankly was shocked by number of out of state UM grads in DMV where I lived post college for 10+ years. Seems the trickle down theory from ivies is true - at least based on my interactions with those grads.
Yup, from the Northeast, work with a lot of "elite school" types, and Michigan is definitely clumped in with "top schools" outside of Ivies. (I also happen to come from a long-line of NJ residents going to UMich dating back to the '30s-'40s... but that obviously pre-dates this trend! Though Rutgers being a teaching college back in the day and NJ not having many good in-state options definitely contributed even then.)
One interesting point that is, I think, alluded to here but overlooked: NY's state university system lacks prestige, and that is a huge driver of those kids, particularly, going out of state (from an UM C background). SUNY has great schools, but they have zero name recognition, and for someone who can pay full freight, that feels like a poor tradeoff compared to sending their kid to an OSU, UMD, etc., where those powerful alum networks exist, plus the other things that replicate the college experiences of their parents or the idealized version they want their kids to experience (football, Greek life, campuses that are lovely and historic).
That's been true since I was growing up in these suburbs of NYC 20+ years ago, and it's even more true now, if only based on the published college committments of our local seniors.
SUNY also doesn't have an agreed upon flagship, which I think has really hurt their ability to tap this market (I guess from an academic standpoint the fancy part of SUNY is half of Cornell, but that's a weird dynamic all on its own). I think that leads to a situation where affluent students looking for a "college experience" perceive even the big flagship-ish SUNY campuses as being regional or commuter schools that aren't what they're looking for.
The thing that is so interesting about this is that, realistically, most students don't need to go to places with prestige names and often would be better off going somewhere less expensive. Most of us will end up doing jobs that we don't get because we went somewhere fancy. I work in higher ed and I can't tell you where the majority of my staff went because it doesn't actually matter to me in terms of ability to tell if they'll be able to do their job. I suspect most jobs are like that.
So many great points in this interview. Suburban Boston UMC parent whose son is at University of Maryland. He went to a STEM high school, and one of the best pieces of advice that his guidance counselors gave his class was to look beyond Massachusetts for colleges to increase your chance of being accepted. The pool of graduating seniors in any given year in Massachusetts is very strong. He is a smart kid, but didn't have exceptional grades. We don't qualify for financial aid, but in our minds, the value UMD offers for out-of-state tuition is excellent. It's a top-notch school, and for his major, top 10 nationwide.
I appreciate the insight into Southern Greek life - the socioeconomics and culture of it all. It makes my and my family's hair stand on end. The privilege and selectivity reminds me of the eating clubs at Princeton, where I spent many years as a financially struggling graduate student.
The benefit to the universities for out-of state students seems akin to how private colleges and universities love international students who pay tuition in full.
I love that this interview came from a UMD professor. When I was getting accepted into colleges in 2013, I applied to UMD because it was my state school. In theory, I definitely should have gotten in, but UMD was fond of the partial rejection at the time (they may still do this!) where they reject you for fall semester, but accept you for spring semester. You are actually still welcome to take classes in the fall, but you can’t live on campus and you have no access to a meal plan or anything like that. We speculated back then that it was because they were trying to admit more out-of-state students, and lo and behold! That seems to be the case! Really fascinating interview here. Thanks AHP!
Wow, that is super interesting - baking in a pipeline of in-state to backfill the bit of attrition after one semester. They must have known approx how many beds they’d have open after fall and that’s a good way to ensure they get the full year of room/board. I am assuming (but perhaps incorrectly) that if you were welcome to take classes that first term is was as a non-matriculating student, therefore with no FAFSA review and no merit-based aid?
Something that's stuck in my head since reading about Southern schools' out of state recruitment is this article: https://www.kqed.org/science/1983772/college-bound-californians-prepare-for-rocky-reproductive-health-landscape-away-from-home
(tl dr, Black kids from California are getting long-acting birth control before heading to HBCUs in the South with restrictive state-level abortion policies)
Are the affluent white kids heading to Bama doing the same, with this level of frankness? Or do they and their parents assume they can come home easily enough if they have an unwanted pregnancy? I'm guessing the latter but I wonder if this kind of preparation is happening in this demographic as well. Is it a topic of conversation amongst parents?
Interesting point. I'm in a huge FB parent group for high school-college-after college and when Roe was overturned there was a lot of mentions about it whenever someone brought up a Southern school. Politics aren't allowed on the page, and comments had to be cut off on multiple posts. One mother, I remember, was like so what, my kid isn't going to live there, what do I care what the laws of the state are? And when informed that accidents happen, was like that doesn't concern me, as if to say 'not my kid'. I'm going with; daughter flies home, has an abortion, attends class online until she can travel back. "I had a family event".
I don’t have a subscription anymore, but the NYT published a really eye opening upshot piece maybe 7-8 years ago using tax record data to analyze how much money student’s parents made for universities across the country and how much of their student body was in the top 1%, 10%, 25%. I went to UIUC as an in state student. It had a pretty high amount of wealthy kids 50% students from top 20%, mainly north shore and west suburb kids. But it wasn’t nearly as bad as UMichigan. I found the article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-colleges-have-more-students-from-the-top-1-percent-than-the-bottom-60.html
[Anecdote related to that nyt report: I come from a very wealthy background - I know, not cool to admit on AHP substack or anywhere really. I looked at University of Colorado Boulder, CSU, UDenver, Colorado College because I was obsessed w living in Colorado at the time. One of my parent’s friends ran into us at the Denver airport after visiting schools there. He said, “Oh, at Colorado College you can split the student body by which are from the 1% vs the rest.” It was similar at UDenver. The more I thought about it the more I couldn’t stomach going to school being in a bubble like that. I didn’t want my parents paying what was like $60k a year at the time for having mountains in the background and ski trips on weekends and being with a bunch of other wealthy kids. Colorado College had like 25% per that report students from 1% families which is nuts.]
That report might have also included % students who went to public high schools vs private vs home schooled. The % at Ivy league is nuts compared to even selective land grant public schools like the big state schools.
Malcolm Gladwell, who I know over simplifies things and irritates academics and is viewed as blase in some circles, had a really excellent podcast episode about university’s outcomes in terms of income brackets. He compared two universities, one that prioritized enrolling lower income students and the other that pursued wealthy students and poured money into expensive amenities like gourmet food in the cafeteria. https://omny.fm/shows/revisionist-history/food-fight
It really pushed me to think about if I have kids in the future that university choices can have a social justice component. No one lives in a vacuum.
FWIW, I think it *is* cool to admit that you come from a very wealthy background! Per my comment upthread, I wish more people were transparent about their privilege. Personally, I imagine that part of the reason (how significant a part, I'll never know) I got into the school I did was that I didn't apply for any financial aid. I don't think that diminishes how qualified I was, but I think it's only fair to admit that in a veritable sea of applicants with similar test scores and grades, the fact that my tuition was paid in full probably moved the needle.
I'm a parent of a recent college grad (from a smaller offshoot of a Big 10 school, not Greek) and a current college Junior (Big 10 school, Greek) so college admissions and Greek life is my zone right now. My husband and I also attended different Big 10 schools and were Greek in the mid 80s.
I'm originally from Chicago, so OSU is popular there, and we had our current Junior apply (as a backup, sorry). It wasn't really 'known' in our state, he was the only one of his friends applying, although this year 4-5 boys we know are going there. They gave a good amount of money, but he really wanted the school he chose, which was also out of state, and gave a tiny amount, which was better than nothing. We don't qualify for aid, which is appropriate.
My a friend who still lives in a fancy North Shore suburb of Chicago has been telling me for YEARS about how many kids go South because of the money they are given, that it's practically in state rates, although travel and Greek life bring the costs back up.
My Junior's school has also become more East Coast over the years, due to the popularity of one of the majors (not Madison or Michigan, which were always popular on the East Coast), and although I don't think it's affected him socially, some of the fraternities have definitely changed from Midwest based to East Coast based. I'm trying to be a little vague, lol.
And I've said before, but being Jewish also makes me side eye some of the Southern schools, even though I know there are plenty of Jews in the South and at these schools. I do remember a friend telling me that when she was in college in the South in the 80s, she didn't rush because the house she wanted "already had their Jewish girl". And someone commented previously that my sorority, SDT, doesn't participate in rush at UA, I assume because it's predominately Jewish and rushes are not.
I grew up in a tiny midwestern town, was a first generation college student, and went to a community college for two years before transferring because my parents didn’t have the financial resources to help me with college.(Which was fine, it was the mid-90s and while I felt like I carried a lot of debt from school, it was NOTHING compared to what people carry today. And I think I valued my eduction more because I was paying for it, I was highly motivated to finish my undergrad in four years.) I do not have kids. Reading essays like this reminds me about how little I know about this other world. I’m also reminded of something pointed out in the article, how these sorts of systems continue to reinforce economic - and racial - hierarchies and what the consequences of that are. Lots to chew on this Sunday morning.
This train of articles has been weirdly applicable in my life. I work for the University of Georgia and have since 2012....the bewildering shift, especially in the past 3 years to accommodate the influx of wealthy students (well, students with wealthy moms and dads) has been weird to watch. What's worse is that I primarily work with the post-grad crowd (grad students, postdocs, med/vet students, etc) who most definitely cannot afford the pricy student housing (now with dog spas! AHP should look into the new line of student property amenities, it's a trip).
On the other hand of this....I'm a B.S and PhD grad from West Virginia University. Yes, they of the "lets-nuke-the-humanities-because-really-do-they-make-that-much-money-anyway?" fame. So I'm bouncing between "dog-spa-levels of wealth" at UGA, and McSweeny's joke articles about academic penny pinching at WVU.
What a strange time to be an academic.
and one month later - the WV board of governors voted to approve the cuts. 28 majors and 143 faculty positions. 1/3 of the education department and the entire world language department. Even my own STEM-focused major (BS Chemistry) is making cuts.
One thing that’s interesting to me about UA (and I’m curious about Auburn’s numbers as the other big state school) versus UGA, where 82% of the class of 2023 are in state students, is the role that the state lottery has played on admissions. When I went to college at UGA the HOPE Scholarship was brand new. It ensured that any high school senior with a 3.0 who got in to a state school could attend tuition free as long as they maintained a 3.0. The standards have changed now--it’s harder to get and I’m not sure it’s as generous--but my understanding is that it’s largely responsible for propelling UGA into the status of respected flagship academic institution like UVA, UM, and UNC. And it also ensured a diverse and largely in state population. I grew up 15 minutes from the Alabama border and I remember when Alabama was voting on a lottery in maybe 2000 or 2002 (it failed) and the pro lottery group ran an ad with students sitting around wearing UGA gear saying “thank you, Alabama!” because of all the Alabama residents who bought tickets that funded the educations of Georgia residents.
This, I came here to say exactly this. I am from Georgia and went out of state for undergrad, but came back and availed myself of the extremely reasonably priced tuition for law school, and I have no regrets (especially since the law school is now ranked in the top 20). The lottery made UGA a FANTASTIC and affordable school that many more high achieving Georgia kids chose to attend instead of going to more "prestigious" private and/or out of state schools, and so schools like Alabama, Clemson, etc. benefitted by being able to recruit Georgia kids who couldn't get into a suddenly very competitive UGA and were faced with choosing another state's flagship school or a smaller Georgia school like Valdosta State or Georgia Southern. Along with the state's Pre-K program, the HOPE Scholarship is a masterclass in how to use your state's lottery funding to do amazing things to benefit students.
My sister went out of state and then to UGA for law school, too! I always kind of wish I’d gone somewhere smaller (and am encouraging my kids to look at small schools, too), but I’m also really proud of the reputation Georgia has now.
I have a question that jumped out at me as I was reading this post, although my thoughts are not well-formed, so forgive me. All of this out-of-state recruiting, does this have any ulterior motives as related to voting? I know I’ve read things about troubles related to college IDs, where a college student is allowed to vote... if colleges are actively recruiting like this (and it’s working), how does it bode for these kids being able to vote in various elections? Does it make it more complicated? Impossible? Etc...
Having worked in higher ed (including doing admissions work for a long time), I don't think this is really a driver. It's much more about the need for people to pay out of state tuition.
When I was at UGA for vet school in the early 2000s the voting in Clarke County was a MESS.
It was an open secret that they wanted the white kids from the surrounding counties to go to UGA and register to vote in Clarke County to dilute the black vote.
I always voted by absentee ballot when I was in college (thanks to my parents, it wasn't high on my list) and we do the same for our kids. There was some loophole in WI where students are able to vote in local elections even if they are not state residents (I don't remember the details) and my daughter's campus (Eau Claire) had one of the highest county turnouts last fall. I'll bet they try to change that for 2024.
This was so good!
One thing I think is important to add for context is that the decision for public schools to increase their out of state enrollment didn't just come from no where or because there are a bunch of greedy administrators trying to make more money... it's a direct result of state legislatures scaling (sometimes dramatically) the amount of state investment in higher education. State funding of public higher ed is down everywhere (but worse in red states) and public universities get slammed for trying to raise tuition on in-state students (they still do, but many legislatures will limit their ability to increase tuition more than a few percentage points a year) but nobody raises an alarm about increasing costs for out of state students. Recruiting more out of state students is a pragmatic (though not unproblematic) response to systematic state disinvestment in higher ed.
Also, it is worth remembering that most colleges admit most of their applicants, most of the time. We focus a disproportionate amount of our media coverage and parental angst on the schools that are largely outliers in their selectivity.
Fascinating conversation. At my daughter’s orientation at University of Oregon half the auditorium was from California. Apparently “UC Oregon” is how they’re referring to UO now. I guess they’re flocking (hehe) to UO because getting accepted at UC schools is nearly impossible, even as a community college transfer. UC Santa Cruz is my alma mater but there’s no way I’d get accepted now.
Oh, and our anecdotal story suggests that out of state recruitment provides instate financial benefits. Both my kids received a Pathway scholarship, which covers all tuition and fees for anyone who is in state, qualifies for a Pell grant, and has a 3.2 gpa. I’m sure this program rides on the wallets of those Californian out of state tuition payers.