Obsession with elite schools overlooks most higher ed

There are some useful things to ponder once you recover from the disgust aroused by the brazen entitlement and immorality of the recent scandal in which dozens of parents committed fraud to help their children gain acceptance to elite institutions. The spectacle of already-privileged parents seeking to extend their advantage by bribing coaches, hiring impostors to take SATS, and having their children feign disabilities feeds a widespread animus toward higher education.

It also, unfortunately, fixes our focus on a tiny fraction of collegiate education, the most elite institutions attended by between 1 and 4 percent of all college students (depending on how elite your definition of elite is). This narrow focus is nothing new.

While these parents were scheming to get their kids into schools that accept between 10 and 25 percent of applicants, 75 percent of all students are getting educated in colleges that accept a majority of their applicants. The classes they take are fundamentally the same: Psych 101 at your local college is likely very similar to Psych 101 at Stanford, and your local prof might even have a Stanford PH.D.

The bizarrely high demand for seats in the most elite colleges has created a remarkable situation, to be sure, but it doesn’t speak to the reality of the college experience for the overwhelming majority of students. New York has more than 100 private colleges plus 64 SUNY campuses and 20 undergraduate CUNY campuses. Only a few of those

fine colleges qualify as elite, but all are engaged in the crucial task of educating the next generation.

While these parents were paying millions of dollars to gain admission to elite universities, thousands of students were doing what they do every day: studying, problem solving, writing and conducting research, working in internships and community service, acting in plays and writing poetry — often while working a paying job on the side.

Money and privilege do play a scandalously big role in understanding higher ed. The illegal schemes that characterized this fraud have their legal parallels. While it is obviously fraudulent to hire someone to take an SAT for your child, many welloff parents legally spend a lot of money coaching and tutoring kids in test-taking techniques. While it is clearly fraudulent to bribe a coach to name you as a recruited athlete, many schools do admit real athletes and legacy students with lower scores as a regular practice.

More fundamentally, there is a powerful correlation between family income and likelihood of college graduation. Students in the lowest income quartile have a 16 percent chance of graduating from college, while students in the top quartile

have a 76 percent likelihood of graduation. This is the most pressing educational equity issue of our time.

Addressing this inequity ultimately means addressing poverty; everything else is working on the margins. But that work on the margins is important. It includes remedying the inequalities of preschool educational readiness, changing the correlation between good schools and high-income neighborhoods, putting a rein on college costs, and providing support for low-income students who are in college.

The Sage Colleges, and colleges like us across the country, work against the income/education correlation tide on a daily basis by keeping costs low, creating opportunities for students and supporting those students as they take advantage of them. Our students would seem unaffected by this scandal, except that the tawdry tale reinforces what they know all too well: that wealth and privilege are the keys to educational opportunity. That refrain spurs all of us in education — students, faculty, administrators — to work harder to help those without such privilege to succeed and contribute their talents to the world.

Perhaps if we paid less attention to the wealthiest of colleges and more attention to the daily efforts devoted across higher education to achieving student success, we would be less likely to see a scandal of this sort in the first place.