The prevailing philosophy of American higher education is simple enough: The best-funded universities ought to be reserved for the best-qualified students, who are largely from advantaged backgrounds.
Such is the reality described in a new study set to be released through the National Bureau of Economic Research in the coming weeks. The paper documents the all-encompassing stratification of American higher education. It is not simply that top students go to more selective colleges; it’s that those colleges spend far more on their students’ education. This is not just true of elite private universities; it applies to public colleges as well.
In practice, higher education’s pyramid-like structure means that the rich — both academically and financially — get richer through a well-funded college education. At the moment, higher education is under fire for what critics describe as equity and DEI efforts run amok. Yet its intensely unequal structure remains solidly in place.
The basic facts described in this new study — by Princeton's Zachary Bleemer and UC Berkeley’s Jesse Rothstein — are not terribly surprising, but they are rarely laid out so starkly from top to bottom.
At hyper-elite private colleges, there are more students from the top 1% of family income than from the bottom 40%. At public flagship universities, students from the top 20% outnumber those from the bottom 80%. “The more selective the college, the higher-income are its students,” the study says. Those schools also, of course, enroll students with much higher test scores.
Young adults who don’t enroll in college at all tend to come from the least-advantaged families.
This income and academic stratification correlates neatly with the money spent on students’ education, Bleemer and Rothstein show. Elite private schools spend by far the most — often well over $50,000 per student on instruction — but the public system is also highly unequal. Selective public four-year colleges spend more than twice as much per student as community colleges.
This resource gap was not always so extreme; it grew substantially between 1980 and 2010.
The study relies on detailed data to connect students’ family income to their college about a decade and a half ago; there is little evidence this relationship has weakened in the intervening years.
Bleemer and Rothstein say this current arrangement reflects a “meritocratic consensus” — the belief that the quality of students’ college education should depend on their success in high school. This is strangely uncontroversial. In K-12 schools, educators and policymakers often make efforts to drive more support and resources to struggling students. In higher education, the prevailing, albeit usually unstated, belief is that such students deserve less support.
The result is that American higher education widens the inequality of opportunity that begins in childhood. This system is not simply the result of free choices in a free market; it is supported, subsidized, and, in the case of public universities, created by the government.
The study is descriptive in nature, but Bleemer and Rothstein eventually acknowledge their own thinking. “There is little economic evidence justifying the status quo on efficiency grounds, and substantial room for skepticism,” they conclude.
Rothstein tells me that he would like to see more funding for community colleges. Bleemer notes that selective schools can exist without such massive resource differences.
Some adherents to higher ed’s “meritocratic consensus” have insisted that less academically prepared students do not benefit from the better-funded education that more selective colleges have to offer. Yet research suggests this is simply not the case, and it would be rather strange if it were.
When choosing a school, "the one number that you want to look up is what is being spent on a student in the college or university,” Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby recently advised. This is a key reason why equity advocates in higher education have been desperate to get more low-income students into elite schools, albeit with limited success.
The result of the current system is not simply that some students don’t get to attend their dream colleges. It’s that their fallback options often provide a worse-quality education.
Yet efforts to break the “meritocratic consensus” have drawn fierce pushback. At the University of California system, faculty have complained about underprepared students slipping through the admissions sieve since standardized tests were dropped from consideration. The response, faculty and others insist, should be to keep such students out. Little attention is paid to where they would go instead.
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