Why universities should favour the rich

Should universities make more effort to attract students from poor families? The government thinks so. But I'm not sure. I reckon there are (at least) five reasons why universities should discriminate in favour of the rich:
1. Equality. Such discrimination would reduce the value of degrees. At the moment, Oxford graduates get better jobs partly because employers believe one has to be clever to get into Oxford. But if they knew that Oxford only took rich kids, this signal would weaken and one part of the Oxford premium would disappear.
2. Welfarism. Denying a university place to a public schoolboy hurts him not only by denying him what he expected but also by blighting his life-chances. Having Eton and redbrick on one's CV signals to all that - except in rare cases - one was too thick to get into Oxbridge despite the best schooling money could buy. That's nasty.
By contrast, giving the Etonian's place to a snotty-nosed oik doesn't provide a sufficiently offsetting gain in welfare. Sure, the oil would gain a higher income. But this is offset by the loneliness and isolation he suffers from not fitting in, not so much at Oxford but in the "high-flying career" he endures thereafter.
So, net, there's a loss of aggregate well-being.
3. Legitimating hierarchy. The belief that universities must recruit talented people derives in some part from a belief in hierarchy. The idea is that companies and government departments can be controlled from the top down, if only people of sufficient ability are in charge. And the job of universities is to find and develop that ability.
But this is an illusion. Centralized control fails because no-one - not even the best and brightest - has the ability to know everything, as Hayek pointed out.
If society were denied a pool of talented people, organizations might give up the futile search for people smart enough to manage them, and look instead for more open and egalitarian forms of control. This process might be accelerated if having rich duffers in charge caused more organizational failure.
4. Social capital. Michael Young pointed out the evils of meritocracy 50 years ago. It would, he said, lead the rich to become smug and contemptuous of the poor, whilst the poor would end up "morally naked" and feeling like failures.
"Noblesse oblige" was wildly exaggerated. But it recognized a truth - that when the rich are rich because of luck they will be less arrogant.
5. Rawlsianism. John Denham says: "An individual's success should be determined by talent and hard work, not where they went to school." Why? One's talent and capacity for hard work are as much a result of what one got from one's parents as where one went to school. All are, in Rawls' words, "arbitrary from a moral point of view." So what's the meaningful moral difference between them?

Comments

[Matt Munro]

In any case, for reasons I won't bore you with, Archers tended to be middle class, so unlikely to be using them for happy slapping or extracting money with menaces

[Peter Risdon]

I sense Will has mixed feelings about this post. he has a point. You even slightly misrepresent Michael Young - who actually said that a new class would form and stratify. Yes, he used the phrase you quote, but in the context of complaining that meritocracy would undermine the previous class system. No kidding?

That would be most welcome. The class system sucks and striving to maintain it is just evil.

[Peter Risdon]

Oh, and saying that archers were middle class is... invigoratingly strange.

[Bob B]

The authorities up in Yorkshire in the 14th century evidently took the threat of that outlaw Robin Hood seriously enough so I'm sceptical that the long bow was quite the innocuous and ineffective weapon as presented above here:
http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/n-s/robin04.html

In fact, this link rather suggests that the long bow was an absolutely lethal weapon over short distances and it was also relatively cheap to produce and therefore highly cost-effective providing archers were sufficiently trained and practised. However, the prospect of having skilled and practised archers wandering around was sufficiently daunting to authorities in France to discourage them from attempting to emulate this weapon of mass slaughter so successfully deployed by English armies in France in a succession of battles at Crecy (1346), Poitiers (1356) and Agincourt (1415):
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/longbow.htm

The interesting question is what discouraged the French from adopting such a cost-effective weapon? I suspect that what worried the authorities there was the possibility that having many skilled archers around could constitute a threat to internal stability.

[Chris Williams]

"Summer school at Durham was like a survival course in sleep deprivation and alcohol abuse, don't attempt if over 35. "

Don't listen to this nonsense. Almost everyone survives mine, and age doesn't seem to have any bearing on their resilience. And it's not just sleep deprivation and alcohol, there's also quite a bit of education going on.

[Katherine]

I'm going to regret this but... Dearieme, why exactly does your "justification" for choosing the younger male not apply to the females too? You say the females will tend to be more mature - this may well be true, but how exactly does that mean that they will be also at the same maturity as each other? The younger will still, presumably (using your own reasoning) be less mature than the older.

Also, how exactly does your (b) reason for choosing the prettier girl actually justify anything? You say that admitting the pretty girl will attract more pretty girl applicants as if this is a good in itself - care to share the logic, because it's pretty much (ho ho) lost on me. Surely the point should be to attract the best applicants, some of which may (shock horror) be ugly.

Also, your "finding supervisors for pretty girls is easier" statement (or rather, that of your friend) is astonishingly vacuous. You don't have to find supervisors for undergraduates, you dunce - they go to pre-arranged lectures and pre-arranged seminars. You might just about make sense if talking about independent research students for masters or PhD dissertations, but once again your assumption is that the supervisors being courted are male and heterosexual.

[Matt Munro]

Don't listen to this nonsense. Almost everyone survives mine, and age doesn't seem to have any bearing on their resilience. And it's not just sleep deprivation and alcohol, there's also quite a bit of education going on.

Posted by: Chris Williams | October 12, 2007 at 11:14 PM

Yeah and quite a bit of old fart lecturers shagging (or trying to) student totty.

[BellaCat]

Not quite up to the standard of 'A Modest Proposal'. (Jonathan Swift's little effort).
http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html