Tearing down the gates: confronting the class divide in American Education

Liberal Education, Summer, 2009 by Peter Sacks

EDITOR'S NOTE: At the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the 2009 Frederic W. Ness Book Award was presented to Peter Sacks for his book Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education (University of California Press, 2007). The following is based on the presentation made there by the author.

When we Americans talk about access to a college education, we tend to narrow the acceptable boundaries of the conversation. We ask why the cost of college has gotten so out of control compared to the costs of other goods and services, and we sometimes talk about the closely related subject of financial aid. But very rarely do we discuss the dramatic changes to the financial aid system that have made college increasingly unaffordable to the very students who need financial aid most. In researching my book Tearing Down the Gates, I came to the conclusion that, despite the oft-repeated rhetoric to the contrary, the American education system actually helps perpetuate inequality of opportunity.

Increasing class stratification

Colleges and universities have been vigorous advocates of diversity, but on the whole they have not been as vigorous as advocates for addressing inequality of educational opportunity. Although affirmative action programs in admissions and financial aid became the primary tools for achieving diversity, it would be a mistake to conclude that the affirmative action movement was fueled by higher education's drive for social justice or its desire to remedy inequality. After the civil rights battles, affirmative action morphed from a social justice remedy to an educational rationale, based on the notion that diversity of cultures, races, and points of view all contribute to the educational mission of the university. As a result, institutions of higher education have seen diversity primarily through the lens of race, ethnicity, and gender--a limitation that, regrettably, has hampered the drive for a deeper and perhaps more meaningful kind of diversity. Because the diversity movement has narrowly focused on race, and not necessarily justice, the movement has left intact the very mechanisms in admissions and financial aid that institutions have long employed systematically to sort potential students by class.

In terms of enrollments at America's most selective colleges and universities, the class divide in higher education had become quite extreme by the end of the twentieth century. When Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose (2003) examined the socioeconomic distribution of freshmen enrollments at the most selective 146 colleges and universities in the United States, they discovered that more than 90 percent of the freshmen came from families in the top half of the socioeconomic distribution. Just 10 percent came from families at the bottom half of the socioeconomic distribution. Even as race-based affirmative action policies have been expanded over the years, class has became a more formidable barrier to access than even race. Carnevale and Rose found that 22 percent of the freshmen at the most selective colleges and universities were from underrepresented minority groups, compared to just 3 percent from low-income families.

Notwithstanding these disparities, some observers will contend that anybody who really wants to go to college can still gain admission to some college or university in America. But just how true is this contention? It seems hard to fathom, given our persistent belief that, in America, educational opportunity is widespread, but the chance of getting a bachelor's degree by age twenty-four has improved only for those from families in the upper half of the nation's income distribution. In 1970, just 6 percent of high school graduates from families in the bottom income quartile attained a bachelor's degree by age twenty-four. This statistic essentially flatlined in subsequent decades, and remained at 6 percent in 2002. The number of students from lower-middle-class families--those in the second-lowest income quartile--who attained a bachelor's degree also stagnated during this period, remaining at 10-15 percent. In contrast, students from upper-middle-income families--those in the third income quartile--saw their prospects nearly double, from 15 percent to 28 percent. And for students from the highest income families, the prospect of attaining a bachelor's degree by age twenty-four improved significantly--from 40 percent to more than 70 percent (Mortensen 2008).

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Over the past twenty or thirty years, the American higher education system has become deeply stratified along class lines. Whether a high school graduate goes to college, and where he or she goes to college, powerfully depends on his or her class status at birth and during childhood. That is, one's prospects for post-secondary education depend significantly on whether one's parents went to college, on the family's annual income, and on financial wealth. What is more, the correlations between class status and prospects for success in higher education have become even more pronounced in recent decades.