Unequal Higher Education: Wealth, Status, and Student Opportunity

By Barrett J. Taylor and Brendan Cantwell

American higher education is often understood as a vehicle for social advancement. However, the institutions at which students enroll differ widely from one another. Some enjoy tremendous endowment savings and/or collect resources via research, which then offsets the funds that students contribute. Other institutions rely heavily on student tuition payments. These schools may struggle to remain solvent, and their students often bear the lion’s share of educational costs. Unequal Higher Education identifies and explains the sources of stratification that differentiate colleges and universities in the United States. Barrett J. Taylor and Brendan Cantwell use quantitative analysis to map the contours of this system. They then explain the mechanisms that sustain it and illustrate the ways in which rising institutional inequality has limited individual opportunity, especially for students of color and low-income individuals. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: May 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9780813593517

Book preview

Unequal Higher Education

The American Campus

Series editor, Harold S. Wechsler

The books in the American Campus series explore recent developments and public policy issues in higher education in the United States. Topics of interest include access to college and college affordability; college retention, tenure, and academic freedom; campus labor; the expansion and evolution of administrative posts and salaries; the crisis in the humanities and the arts; the corporate university and for-profit colleges; online education; controversy in sport programs; and gender, ethnic, racial, religious, and class dynamics and diversity. Books feature scholarship from a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Vicki L. Baker, Laura Gail Lunsford, Meghan J. Pifer, Developing Faculty in Liberal Arts Colleges: Aligning Individual Needs and Organizational Goals

Derrick R. Brooms, Jelisa Clark, and Matthew Smith, Empowering Men of Color on Campus: Building Student Community in Higher Education

W. Carson Byrd, Poison in the Ivy: Race Relations and the Reproduction of Inequality on Elite College Campuses

Nolan L. Cabrera, White Guys on Campus: Racism, White Immunity, and the Myth of Post-Racial Higher Education

Jillian M. Duquaine-Watson, Mothering by Degrees: Single Mothers and the Pursuit of Postsecondary Education

Scott Frickel, Mathieu Albert, and Barbara Prainsack, eds., Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Theory and Practice across Disciplines

Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed, eds., A New Deal for the Humanities: Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Higher Education

Adrianna Kezar and Daniel Maxey, eds., Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century: Moving to a Mission-Oriented and Learner-Centered Model

Ryan King-White, ed., Sport and the Neoliberal University: Profit, Politics, and Pedagogy

Dana M. Malone, From Single to Serious: Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses

A. Fiona Pearson, Back in School: How Student Parents are Transforming College and Family

Barrett J. Taylor and Brendan Cantwell, Unequal Higher Education: Wealth, Status, and Student Opportunity

Unequal Higher Education

Wealth, Status, and Student Opportunity

BARRETT J. TAYLOR

BRENDAN CANTWELL

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Taylor, Barrett Jay, author. | Cantwell, Brendan, 1980- author.

Title: Unequal higher education : wealth, status, and student opportunity / Barrett J. Taylor, Brendan Cantwell.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2019] | Series: The American campus | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018032219 | ISBN 9780813593500 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813593494 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Universities and colleges—United States—Evaluation. | Universities and colleges—United States—Finance. | College costs—United States. | Education, Higher—Economic aspects. | Education, Higher—Social aspects—United States. | Educational equalization—United States.

Classification: LCC LB2331.63 .T38 2019 | DDC 378.73—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032219

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2019 by Barrett J. Taylor and Brendan Cantwell

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

We dedicate this volume to our children—Liam and Rose, Oliver and Agnes—in the hope that their generation will forge a more just and equitable social compact.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1 The Roots of Unequal Higher Education

2 A Field Account of Unequal Higher Education

3 Mapping Unequal Higher Education

4 Unequal Public Higher Education: Stratification and Drift

5 Unequal Private Higher Education: Persistent Inequalities

6 Unequal Higher Education and Student Opportunity

7 Consequences of Unequal Higher Education: Student Success and Mortgaged Futures

8 Contesting Unequal Higher Education

Appendix

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Unequal Higher Education

Introduction

Families want good opportunities for their children. That is why getting kids into the right college is an important goal for so many households. Some families start thinking about college when children are born; others do not plan for higher education until much later. Regardless, college admission is widely seen as an accomplishment (and rightly so!). College admission is something to celebrate, and we do not want to rain on anyone’s parade.

Still, as higher education researchers, we tend to carry umbrellas. Rains come. Every college admission letter is part of a complex and competitive system that is fraught with inequality. An offer of admission is always something to celebrate, but some offers bring far more promise than do others. Our book is devoted to understanding why inequality among colleges and universities is durable.

We also focus on what inequality among institutions means for students. The term students is, in many ways, a convenient fiction. There is no such thing as the student, and collectively students are so diverse that the term is almost meaningless. Some students have never known want, while others have struggled to make ends meet throughout their lives. White students benefited—often unconsciously—from white privilege, while students of color have faced discrimination on both macro and micro levels. To understand the consequences of the system of unequal higher education, it is necessary to understand who has what opportunities at a given point in time.

Criticisms about higher education are common. Facing high tuition prices, students and families often say that colleges are becoming like corporations, soaking up as much money as possible. It is true that colleges and universities seek revenue. But they also strive for recognition. In more formal terms, colleges and universities are both revenue maximizers and status seekers.¹ This means that higher education institutions compete on two fronts simultaneously. Institutions pursue both dollars and prestige. The interaction of money and status drives institutional inequality in higher education.

Rising institutional inequality is not evident by all measures. Despite dramatic changes in the financing of higher education, total spending per student has remained at about the same level of inequality in recent decades.² However, total spending per student does not tell the whole story. Colleges and universities get revenue from multiple sources, and the source of money matters. Consider two hypothetical colleges. One institution relies heavily on tuition. Because enrollments fluctuate, this institution’s tuition reliance makes long-range planning difficult. Another institution draws revenue from many sources and so is relatively insulated from fluctuation in any one source of support. While these two institutions might appear similar in aggregate spending, they really are very different. One is chaotic and uncertain, effectively reinventing its budget every time a new cycle of student recruitment begins. The other is stable and secure, knowing that its staff will be able to select whom to admit from a wide pool of applicants who are attracted by the campus’s reputation and resources.

As the hypothetical example of two campuses illustrates, conceptualizing inequality among colleges and universities is a complex task. We have identified two axes along which colleges and universities differ. First, institutions compete in vertical space. Vertical competition implies that more is better. Total spending per student or greater admission selectivity, all else equal, is preferable to more limited means or lower levels of demand for admission. Second, institutions differ horizontally. In the horizontal dimension, no set of practices is preferable to another. An institution may enroll many students, like a flagship research university, or fewer students, like an intimate liberal arts college. Institutions in both groups can provide an excellent education.

The purpose of this book is to map the ways that colleges and universities differ, to explain why those differences have grown over time, and to explore the consequences of those changes. Our account adopts a field-level approach, meaning that we consider the rules, resources, and mixture of organizations available in the field of U.S. higher education at varying points in time.³ Most of the best work in this vein, such as higher education researchers Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades’s book Academic Capitalism in the New Economy (2004), highlights the consequences of changing field conditions for institutions, faculty, and students. We instead seek to understand how the landscape of available institutions has changed over time. We ask: What is the available inventory of colleges and universities at a given moment? What explains membership in various groups of institutions? Which students attend what kinds of institutions?

Answering these questions allows us to map the contours of an unequal field. We offer explanations for this asymmetrical landscape and highlight the consequences of organizational inequality for student opportunity. In short, we outline the set of relationships that we term the system of unequal higher education.

Investigating Institutional Wealth, Status, and Student Opportunity

The dynamics of inequality within a social field are complex. It is easy to become lost in details. As academic researchers, it is our obligation to back up our arguments with data and facts. We do this throughout the volume. However, it is also useful to have an outline of our main arguments as an introduction to the book’s overall course.

Our central arguments are (1) that competition for resources and social status creates a system of unequal higher education, (2) that the retreat of direct government funding has unleashed this competition with growing intensity, (3) that over the past forty years policy choices and cultural practices have increased inequality among colleges and universities in the United States, and (4) that growing institutional inequality systematically disadvantages underserved students. To provide as strong an account as possible, we illustrate the connections between an institution’s wealth and its status using data and details in ways that sometimes seem granular. We have worked to provide as plain an account as possible, but sometimes precise analysis of data is needed to demonstrate the basis of our arguments. The details themselves are not the point. We seek to illuminate why the system of unequal higher education exists in the form that it does, its consequences for students, and the ways in which it might be changed.

We focus on the system because we are interested in the consequences of rising institutional inequality for individual students. College education plays an extraordinarily large role—perhaps too large a role in the eyes of some skeptics⁴—in an individual’s prospects for upward mobility. Yet no one simply goes to college. Rather, everyone attends a particular college or university. The range of institutions available to any given student constitutes a large part of the opportunity that higher education offers to that individual.

As we document throughout this book, the landscape of available colleges and universities has changed dramatically since about 1980. Over time, more institutions have become lower-status, financially struggling campuses. At the same time, the number of Elite and Super Elite institutions (more on these categories later) has remained about the same. As a result, there are fewer good opportunities now for college students than there were in the past. Going to college is, for almost everyone, better than not going to college. However, it is now more difficult and more expensive to find one’s way to a college that provides good value than it was even a few years ago.

We came to this basic conclusion after conducting three types of analyses: (1) synthesis of existing research and historical analysis, (2) conceptual analysis using social theory, and (3) quantitative analyses of empirical data. Our historical and conceptual analyses span the period from around 1980 to the present. The resulting narrative provides the backbone of our argument. Quantitative analyses lend empirical support to our claims and help to paint a clear and detailed picture about the system of unequal higher education. Because of data coverage limitations, our quantitative analyses are restricted to the period between 2005 and 2013 and, as a result, we give this time frame the most detailed attention. Our window of data covers the years just prior to, during, and after the Great Recession. Analyzing data over this period is important because, as we explain later, state governments’ responses to the Great Recession have had a profound effect on making higher education more unequal.

Rising institutional inequality restricts opportunity for all students. However, these changes are particularly concerning for underserved students. Our results indicate that students of color and low-income students are concentrated at the lowest-resource, lowest-status institutions in the United States. While these students often overcome extraordinary barriers to achieve successes, we are concerned that the barriers exist in the first place. We seek to identify the sources of these barriers to opportunity and to identify leverage points for removing them.

This is a daunting task. To keep ourselves on track, we regularly refer back to the subtitle of the book: Wealth, Status, and Student Opportunity. We have used it as a map to guide our writing, and we hope it will serve to make the book more useful for readers. Although we conceptualize wealth and status as distinct, the two tend to go together. Most of the time, a wealthy institution is also a prestigious institution. The question then becomes how many institutions are invested with how much wealth and status and which students have access to the campuses that have the most of both. We think this question is important because it addresses which students enjoy the opportunity to benefit from wealthy, high-status institutions and which ones must overcome obstacles to opportunity. Throughout the volume, we will refer back to these three concepts: wealth, status, and student opportunity.

An Overview of Unequal Higher Education

Institutional inequality is a durable feature of American higher education. More than four decades ago, Alexander Astin and Calvin Lee (1971) noted that hundreds of colleges were invisible due to their low status and uncertain financial outlook. Much of this inequality is intentional. Policymakers designed state systems of higher education to be unequal in an effort to balance the imperatives of broad participation, high quality, and total cost.⁵ The archetype of such a system is the vaunted California Master Plan, with its elite flagship campuses, its expansive state universities, and its open enrollment community colleges.⁶ Such a system takes institutional inequality for granted and attempts to leverage it as a strength, providing both expensive education for select students and broad access for the general population.

If unequal higher education is long-standing and often intentional, why read a book about it? The short answer is that the inequality in the system today is more severe than in the past. The sort of designed inequality found in the California Master Plan was not the focus of concern for Astin and Lee, nor is it ours. Although the Master Plan and its replicates in other states were never perfect, during a time of political and financial support they worked reasonably well.⁷ We do not focus on the mid-century inequality that provided some students with a good-value option (a mid-century California State University campus) and offered others a great-value option (a mid-century University of California campus). Rather, we focus on present inequality in which virtually all students feel compelled to enroll in college yet few have the opportunity to attend a good-value institution. Opportunities for many students have been restricted by changes in the mixture of available institutions. There are simply more low-status institutions and fewer high-status institutions—especially in the public sector—than was the case even a decade ago.

We believe that prior levels of institutional inequality have been exacerbated—reaching levels not intended by the architects of stratified public systems—by two forces. The first of these destabilizing forces is financial. Costs per student have risen rapidly.⁸ Simultaneously, direct government support for public institutions has declined,⁹ and only a few private institutions can marshal large pools of resources via investments and fundraising.¹⁰ This simple recipe—rising costs and uncertain revenues—has placed a growing number of institutions on a financial precipice. Decision-makers at such institutions are desperate for any revenues they can secure. At the same time, institutions can accumulate resources indefinitely; no amount of money is too much to invest in fulfilling a mission of educational excellence.¹¹ Because there is no limit to the resources that can be spent on education, the most prestigious institutions work hard to capture as many resources as possible. Whether out of desperation, the endless quest for excellence, or some combination of the two, colleges and universities compete with feverish intensity for every available resource.

The second destabilizing force is cultural. Colleges and universities are not firms that seek to maximize profits and disburse them to shareholders. Instead, they are mission-driven organizations that engage in status-seeking behaviors even when these operations are not profitable.¹² Selective admission practices may indicate mission fulfillment insofar as an institution’s mission is to educate the best and brightest students available. Admission selectivity is also—in most cases—a money loser. A student denied admission is revenue forsworn. Businesses generally want as many paying customers as possible, but virtually all presidents would like their college or university to turn away more students because selective admission is a key indicator of status.

Both financial and cultural factors point to increased competition among colleges and universities, which has made the field even more unequal than it used to be. What is more, the dynamics resulting from heightened competition are largely self-reinforcing. The incentives to compete for resources and status remain strong and so are likely to produce even more competitions and even greater inequality. We refer to these self-perpetuating dynamics as the system of unequal higher education.

The system of unequal higher education reflects the dynamics of institutional wealth and status, and it entails important consequences for the opportunities available to individual students. Consider a hypothetical example that is rooted in the results of our primary quantitative model (see chapter 3). Imagine being a low-income student who is trying to select a college. In 2005, you might have been able to select among multiple Subsidy Reliant campuses that offered low tuition to residents of your state. Any of these options would have spent more on your education than you spent in tuition. You could not necessarily afford a high-priced Elite private campus, and might not have been able to secure admission to the state flagship Multiversity, but would have had several high-value, low-price options from which to choose a best fit.

By 2013, however, things would look quite different. The number of Subsidy Reliant publics had dropped steeply since 2005 (chapter 3) due to a complex series of financial and cultural factors (chapter 4). Your state might now offer only one Subsidy Reliant institution from which to choose. A study of that individual Subsidy Reliant institution would find that the campus you are considering has done better at expanding equality and participation than has its peers. For you as a student, however, the operations of one campus matter less than the fact that there are fewer such campuses that you can consider when selecting a college. Your opportunities have been circumscribed not by any particular institution but by the change in the mixture of available institutions—in other words, by the system of unequal higher education. There are simply fewer good seats available to you than there were a decade ago. The reality of dwindling good value opportunities becomes apparent when considering the field of available campuses.

To be sure, well-intentioned campus administrators, researchers, and philanthropic organizations are working hard to improve the education at many beleaguered campuses. Better practices on campus can ameliorate the worst consequences of the system of unequal higher education. These noble efforts cannot redress the profound ways in which it circumscribes student opportunity by limiting the number of enrollment destinations that are well positioned to support student success.

The Argument in Brief

There are several key elements of our argument. These points illustrate how we build on prior understandings of institutional inequality.

Unequal higher education is multidimensional, encompassing both horizontal and vertical elements. The simplest way to think about inequality is a vertical hierarchy. Campus A has more money, practices more selective admissions, and receives higher positions in rankings than does Campus B; therefore Campus A stands above Campus B in the field hierarchy. Hierarchy of this sort plays a role in institutional inequality. However, there are also horizontal differences among institutions. American colleges and universities espouse many diverse missions, come in many different sizes, and result from distinct institutional histories.¹³ Efforts such as the Carnegie Classifications attempt to describe horizontal differences by sorting institutions based on the degrees that they offer. While these efforts are laudable (and influential), they ignore the fact that institutions are also vertically differentiated into a hierarchy. It is very different to be a large endowment private university with few, carefully selected undergraduates than a large enrollment public university with lagging state support. However, both institutions can belong to the same Carnegie group. Similarly, rankings and other accounts of vertical differentiation often compare institutions that are playing very different games. A Super Elite research university can accumulate wealth and status via many avenues, while an Elite college only has access to the avenue of admission selectivity. Our map of unequal higher education is dynamic enough to account for both vertical and horizontal differences among institutions. This marks a distinct departure from prior work on the topic.

Horizontal and vertical differences have become tightly linked. Historically, horizontal and vertical differences have been relatively independent of one another. Mission and status were on two separate axes. Results of our analyses suggest this pattern may no longer hold true. As costs have increased, some public and a few private institutions have staved off financial ills by growing their enrollments. Institutions that lacked sufficient demand from would-be students could not grow. Such campuses disproportionately became Vulnerable. In the most general terms, in the middle- and lower-status parts of the system, universities fared better than did colleges because it was easier for them to become larger. A similar pattern occurred at the high-status end of the spectrum. Elite colleges and universities have attained a different form of status than that attained by Super Elite universities. In essence, there have been parallel hierarchies for various horizontal positions. Bowdoin and Swarthmore once could operate as the equivalent of Princeton in the hierarchy of liberal arts colleges. This relationship still holds to some extent; the Elite liberal arts colleges continue to fare well. Nonetheless, it is clear that some hierarchies extend upward far beyond others. The Super Elite private research universities attain wealth and status that even the Elite colleges cannot match. Institutions like Grinnell and Pomona may possess enormous endowments per capita but simply cannot keep up with their somewhat larger (but not too large) competitors such as Stanford and Yale. As a result, there was little movement between the Elite and the Super Elite groups. If left unchecked, the system of unequal higher education likely will lead to ever-greater accumulation of wealth and status. The Super Elite universities will leave even the Elite behind. The smaller and somewhat less wealthy Elite colleges and universities simply cannot capture as many total resources as can the best endowed and most selective private research universities.

In recent years, heightened competition has exacerbated inequality. Competitions produce both winners and losers. When many participants vie for the same opportunity, there is only one winner and many losers. This is the case in sports tournaments, an analogy that economist Paula Stephan