The Road To Knowledge Is Paved in Family Money

This year, "elite" colleges all over the country are taking a closer look at the financial stats of their applicants and targeting for admission those who can pay full tuition, according to the New York Times.

As you might well guess, the decision comes out of these private schools' own heightened financial need, having suffered from the same economy that's left Joe Highschooler's family unable to afford higher ed.

But schools aren't abandoning that classic and oh-so-comforting "need-blind" philosophy. In fact, what's surprising here is that these colleges haven't and don't plan to cut their financial aid budgets. Instead, the shift in their admissions policy is supposedly the result of greater demonstrated need among those applicants who have requested financial aid. (As in, they will accept dumb rich kids to pay the way for poor smart kids.) But even the schools who champion this new admissions policy admit that "the inevitable result is that needier students will be shifted down to the less expensive and less prestigious institutions."

In other words, “there’s going to be a cascading of talented lower-income kids down the social hierarchy of American higher education, and some cascading up of affluent kids,” according to Williams College prez Owen Schapiro.

The Times reported that the colleges in question plan to judge applicants' ability to pay not only by whether they have applied for aid but also on factors such as ZIP code or parents' background. This seems unnecessary as well as creepy. I can only assume that these considerations are a way to ensure that even students who don't apply for aid their first year (clever student!) can be flagged as a potential $ drain later on.

As much as I'd like to throw some spitballs at prez Schapiro and his like, I think that we are all implicated in the exaggerated, illogical reverence for private higher education in this country, and the resulting lack of attention, funds, and prestige reserved for public institutions. So we can't blame the private colleges in question alone for this sad state of affairs, because to do so would be kinda like blaming drug dealers for the world's drug problems (instead of a worldwide, age-old, human craving for narcotics,) and we all know how messy that can get.