Inequities in College Access Threaten the American Dream
Many of us have been watching our society separate by income— the wealthy moving to enclaves surrounding our cities while our poorest families are left behind, concentrated in ghettos from which they struggle to propel their children into places with better chances. Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon has documented these trends, here and here, with numbers that stun even if we have been paying attention. Many of us struggle, however to understand the factors that are converging to ensure our growing inequality. Although we are all caught up in the systems that ensure that we live near people who are pretty much like ourselves, the factors that reinforce inequality are as likely to seem as invisible as the air around us.
In an important report published this summer by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl document the ways that Higher Education Reinforces the Intergenerational Reproduction of White Racial Privilege.
The myth, of course, is that we live in a meritocracy where every April the smartest high school seniors who have worked the hardest receive acceptance letters and financial aid packages that will take them to the most selective colleges. According to Carnevale and Strohl, however: “Polarization by race and ethnicity in the nation’s postsecondary system has
