Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 30

AMERICA'S
AFFORDABLE ELITE
COLLEGES 2014
Which selective schools give high-achieving
non-wealthy students a break in price,
and which break their bank accounts?
By Robert Kelchen

W

hen putting together our annual college rankings, we here at the Washington Monthly
have never given any weight to how selective
schools are, for a number of reasons. First, admission
rates don't tell you much about how much learning actually goes on in classrooms. Selectivity is a measure
of input (how smart and academically prepared the in-

Princeton and Yale
both have even bigger
endowment per student
ratios than Harvard,
but charge low- and
middle-income students
double, triple, or quadruple
as much. What's with that?
coming class is), not outcome. Second, the vast majority of college students never set foot in these elite institutions. Instead, they attend less selective schools
where the spending per student is typically lower (even
if the quality of the education is often comparable be30

September/October 2014

cause there are terrific professors spread all over the
country). Third, the excessive prestige these elite
schools command in our culture, and the press's fixation on them, warps the incentive structure in higher
education-by, among other things, enticing less selective colleges to tighten up their admissions standards
in order to climb the status ladder. This gives those colleges a classier image and their administrators an excuse to raise their own salaries. But it means that these
schools abandon the less affluent, less academically
prepared students they used to teach. These are students who, in a tough globalized economy, desperately
need a quality college education.
As much as we don't want to endorse the college
prestige racket, we understand that there are valid reasons for families to want their kids to go to the most selective schools they qualify for. While the general level of teaching might not necessarily be better at those
schools, the opportunities for networking, internships,
and study-abroad programs often are. Because of peer
pressure, among other things, students at many selective schools put a little more time into their studies. And
the cachet of being able to say you went to an elite school
can last a lifetime.
Another reason to pay attention to elite schools is
equity. Many researchers have shown that academically
gifted students from lower-income families tend to "undermatch" when choosing colleges. That is, they go to
significantly less selective schools than they could have
gotten into, often out of fear (sometimes valid, some-



Washington Monthly - September/October 2014

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