A Fair Path to College

asteriskea
Wed, 09 May 2007 07:33:37 +0000

Related article in today’s Inside Higher Ed: “Tearing Down the Gates”, on a new book by Peter Sacks, critiques the role colleges play in the class structure of the United States. “Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education” urges colleges to pay much more attention to issues of class and to breaking down class barriers.



This notion that the current competitive admissions paradigm is designed to maintain academic “rigor” is a red herring. Selective American colleges and universities, in effect, choose freshman on the basis of social class origins, disguised as system based on “rigor.” When colleges and their entrenched constituencies — boards of trustees, alumni groups, etc. — talk about maintaining academic rigor, this is thinly veiled code for remaining highly selective with regard to admissions, which yields high rankings on prestige-driven scales such as U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings of “Best Colleges.” This has nothing to do with how rigorous a course of study is, or how deeply a college or university engages students in math, literature, history, or science.

But it has everything to do with the socioeconomic profile of the freshman class…