Educational Opportunity

One good result of the Supreme Court's ruling striking down affirmative action in college admissions has been some real talk about how little affirmative action ever meant to most students. In the NY Times, Richard Arum and Mitchell L. Stevens have a piece pointing out that only a small fraction of college students attend colleges that admit fewer than 25% of their applications. The vast majority attend non-selective schools.

If we really want to talk about equality of opportunity for all Americans, these authors say, we should focus not on who gets into elite schools but how to make college better for the majority of students. So, this:

Less selective schools and the millions of students they serve each year deserve the same resources and attention to program quality found in selective institutions. Affirmative action never went far enough. Winning the admissions lottery to Harvard or a selective University of California campus must not be the only path to upward mobility through higher education. All colleges, especially those serving the most diverse student bodies, should be capable of providing outcomes of similar quality.

Ok. But how much would that cost? Arum and Stevens have some numbers: 

In our state, California, U.C.L.A. and the private liberal-arts college Pomona report spending richly per student at $60,528 and $40,275, respectively. Meanwhile, less selective and more diverse institutions like San Francisco State ($8,087) and California State University, Los Angeles ($6,631), report expenditures that are less than a quarter of those amounts.

So all we have to do is find $30,000 or so for each of the 15 million college students in the US. Hey, $450 billion a year, just small change, right? (If you're curious, the most authoritative-seeming number I could find for total higher education spending in the US is around $675 billion, about half of which comes from state and local governments.)

Oy. 

One reason I have long advocated for reducing the number of college students in the US is that I think that is the only way to improve the quality of instruction for the rest. But I have never been sure that it would work. It might instead lead to a spending death spiral, with legislators slashing spending because enrollments are decling and so on. 

I am also not sure that quality of instruction matters as much as Arum and Stevens want it to. I have a strong sense that the main reason students don't learn more in college is that they don't try very hard, and part of my plan has been that making it harder to get into college might motivate people a little.

But I am not optimistic about any of it. Societies get more of what they care about, and in America we just don't care enough about education to get high quality results for everyone.