Build Back Better Colleges

In the wake of last week's anti-affirmative action decision, Larry Summers wrote an editorial urging that elite colleges respond by becoming less exclusive. Grow. Admit more students. Add more programs. Invest in education.

I could not agree more. And it's something we need to do on all fronts. Yes, the Ivy Leagues should get bigger. But the great public universities in our country should also be expanded on. The University of California system is one of the great engines of economic mobility and advancement in large part because it is huge. But there has not been a new UC campus created in almost twenty years, and UC-Merced is by far the smallest undergraduate campus in the entire system. You have to go back another forty years for the most recently established UC campuses which are of a size comparable to the system average (both UC-Santa Cruz and UC-Irvine were established in 1965). Why not create a new UC in Sacramento, or in the Bakersfield or Modesto? Or hell, put one up in Redding? 

Higher education is in a weird moment where there is simultaneously an approaching demographic cliff that will obliterate demand at the bottom end of the scale even as student demand for the top schools surges to unprecedented heights. I don't have answer to the former problem. But the only way to respond to the latter is to increase capacity in "elite" institutions, and that in turn will take a massive investment in education to absorb the tidal wave of demand. 

It's not enough for colleges to exist -- we probably have enough dorm room beds already in the United States. They have to be great colleges -- colleges that are well-supported and well-endowed and well-resourced so that the students who attend can afford to go and know that they're getting an excellent education from top-level professors. Certainly, the far longer-standing crisis in graduate education means we don't lack for supply in the last category. But we also know there's a huge difference between setting up a new fly-by-night program that exists just to exist, versus actually investing in new educational opportunities. UC-Irvine Law School immediately stormed to a top-50 ranking from nothing when it was founded in 2006 because, unlike most other newly-established law schools, it boasted a level of public and private investment that showed it was serious about being a serious institution.

The problem we're experiencing is not actually one of bad minority students taking away the rightful spoils of White and/or Asian students. The problem is one of meritocracy and equalization paired with scarcity: an explosion in students applying for (and being qualified for) "elite" positions with no increase in the number of elite positions available.

Equality means that more and more people have at least nominal potential access to elite institutions, which means that it's harder for any one individual person to access these institutions, which results in a terrifying and never-ending arms race to become (and stay as) one of the elect few, which generates new inequalities in terms of who has access to the resources that allow them to win the arms race and who doesn't.

In a very basic way, it is true that "equality" is the problem here. In the old days, if you were an elite, you could be pretty confident your kids would stay elite so long as they were basically competent: with relatively few people who could or were allowed to compete for prestigious social positions, being "okay" generally was good enough. 

Once the doors are flung open, though, you're competing against everyone, and now it's off to the races. Today, we don't want to say that "only the children of elite university attendees should attend elite universities"; we want to say that every child should have an equal chance to join the Talented Tenth. But saying that means that, if you're in the top 10% right now, you're committing to the notion that your kid should only have a 10% chance of staying in your social strata, and that's a very unpleasant thought that only grows worse as the gap between the top 10% and everyone else increases. But unless your solution is "we should go back to reserving elite roles for the current incumbents", this is necessary feature of an egalitarian social sphere combined with extremely limited "elite" social roles. So if we're not going to accept going back to overt exclusion, we need to tackle the omnipresence and power of scarce "elite" roles. The only actual way to ease the sting of redistributing the pie is growing the pie. The actual, actual villain here is terrifying inequality -- the massive and growing gap between the power, influence, autonomy, and life chances of the elites versus everyone else, which makes so that not getting into Harvard feels like a death knell.

The only way to ease the sting of redistributing the pie is growing the pie. If you're panicking at the seemingly impossible task of seeing yourself or your child admitted to an elite institution, ending affirmative action will not help you. Nor, if we're being honest, will ending legacy admissions. The only thing that will make a difference is a true commitment to investing in education to such a degree that there is space for each of our outstanding youth to receive an outstanding university experience. There's no shortcut, no scapegoat that can substitute for that.

We are blessed as a nation right now to have surfeit of incredibly talented, hard-working, diligent young people who are eminently qualified to attend a great university and deserve to have that chance. The only thing standing in the way is our own willingness to pay for it.