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

[dearieme]

I recommend that whenever two candidates are tied for the last admissions place (i) if both male, admit the younger, (ii) if both female, admit the prettier, (iii) if one of each, spin a coin.

[dsquared]

your 1) and 2) are still based on the whimsical argument that the only purpose of education is signalling (and there's no actual value to it either in itself or in generating human capital) and it's still not right.

and this one:

[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. ]

is a bit barking mate. Two parts "heightening the contradictions" to one part of a massive social experiment in industrial organisation with very few real success stories to show for it, compared to the massive record of growth and productivity since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. I am not sure it makes a lot of sense to be recruiting Hayek on to this one.

[Mark Wadsworth]

Re what Dearime says, I was (by coincidence) in the same bar as a bunch of new Oxford intake a couple of years ago, the girls were all absolutely gorgeous, I mean, really sweet and lovely.

[william]

hahaha that's pretty funny.

now get back to work.

[mat]

If universities were privatized, we wouldn't have to worry about any of this rich kids vs. poor kids nonsense.
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/daily/2006/03/30-finaid.html
http://www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/finaid/eligibility/contribution.php

[Chris Williams]

There's a benefit to the staff in spotting talent (AKA 'social engineering'). Educating the under-qualified but brilliant and motivated, is far more rewarding than trying to do the same for the crammed but mediocre. This leads to lower costs in the HE system.

[Katherine]

Number 2 - no. As the oik who went to Oxbridge with career thereafter I did not experience isolation and lonliness. I am anecdotal, but then so of course is your hypothetical oik. Got any actual studies to show that your oik is more widespread than my oik? Also, even if your oik is more common, increasing the number of oiks overall will lessen that so the problem goes away.

PS If both candidates are male, why not choose the prettier in that case too? Your examples assume that the admission bod is always male and heterosexual.

[Chris Williams]

Another Oxbridge oik, signing in.

OTOH, argument from anecdotal educational experience is the chocolate teapot of debate.

[Peter]

As long as the debate is straitjacketed into utilitarian justifications we will be led inexorably towards the philistinism of today.

How about Higher Education as something life enhancing and pleasurable? How about it as individual growth and development? How about a liberal education?

And if you know anything about the history of working class autodidact tradition you will be aware of a profound popular demand for it. Sod people from Eton who want status, the people who I want to see get the opportunity are people who want to learn, wherever they come from.

Currently we exclude the excellent and the inquisitive in favour of mediocre conformists. HE is for all and should be open to all and sometimes those of us who work in the less orthodox corners of the University world can glimpse what an inclusive HE would look like. And I can tell you it is inspiring and wonderful.

[Bob B]

"And if you know anything about the history of working class autodidact tradition you will be aware of a profound popular demand for it."

The Mechanics Institute tradition was a great tradition:
http://www.victorianlondon.org/education/mechanicsinstitute.htm

Sadly, I know of little evidence that the tradition still matters nowadays for those it was originally intended. The estimable Birbeck College and the Open University seem to be mainly providing opportunities for professional people to upgrade their professional qualifications.

In the run-up to the 1997 election, Gordon Brown conjured with the idea of a New Labour government creating a new Univerity for Industry. He referred to the idea again and to Individual Learnings Accounts in his first Budget speech in 1997 but nothing much has happened since - the usual problem: all talking the talk but no walking the walk:
http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=54997

As best I can tell, the University of the Third Age has the strongest claim to having taken on the tradition of the Mechanics Institutes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_the_Third_Age
http://www.u3alondon.org.uk/

[Charlie Whitaker]

"The estimable Birkbeck College and the Open University seem to be mainly providing opportunities for professional people to upgrade their professional qualifications."

It's a great shame that you're putting this idea about because it is profoundly wrong.

If you have access to the current enrolment of either institution, you'll find that, while the majority of students are working, and in that sense 'professional', they cover a broad spectrum socially, in terms of income, and in terms of educational attainments.

[Charlie Whitaker]

And here's a link to a paper which shows you exactly where Birkbeck and OU students are, in terms of prior qualifications, income, etc. I recommend you read it.

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/benefits/publications/reports-files/surveyone

Key points:

Eight out of ten OU graduates and around half of Birkbeck graduates had no prior higher educational qualification before they joined their course. I'll say that again: no prior HE qualifications. Are you really claiming that these are professionals gilding their resumes?

The average post-graduate income for OU students was around £21,000. For London-based OU graduates, the average income was around £25,000, very similar to that of Birkbeck graduates (who are also London based, obviously). These figures are slightly better than the national average, but not by much. And these are the post-graduation incomes.

I have no idea what is motivating this move to paint adult education as a privilege of the better off, but I think it stinks.

[Bob B]

Charlie - Thanks. Very regretfully, and for entirely divergent reasons, I have recently decided not to pursue options of applying to read for another degree at either Birkbeck or the OU. I was much impressed by the range of courses at Birkbeck but reluctantly concluded that my health would not withstand the amount of travelling up to central London each week necessary to attend classes.

"Eight out of ten OU graduates and around half of Birkbeck graduates had no prior higher educational qualification before they joined their course. I'll say that again: no prior HE qualifications."

That certainly impresses me - I was still switched into what was true of the OU, namely that the largest share of its new entrants were teachers. Do we take it that "no HE qualifications" includes the meaning of "no previous professional qualifications"?

However, IMO all that misses the central issue here of the main sources of educational inequalities and waste of talent in Britain now, which are:

"The research says: 'One striking fact is that poor white students are the lowest performing of all groups at age 16, showing a substantial deterioration in their relative scores through secondary school.'"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/5051850.stm

"White British boys from poor families perform worse at GCSE than almost any other racial group. Official figures show that only 24% of those entitled to free school meals gained five or more good GCSEs last year, compared with 65% of the poorest Chinese boys and 48% of poor Indian and Bangladeshi boys."
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/mike_ion/2007/01/the_bnp_and_the_white_boys.html

"Almost a quarter of secondary schools are failing, with less than 30 per cent of their pupils achieving five good GCSEs including English and maths, the Government admitted last night.

"Lord Adonis, the Schools Minister, said that 800 state secondary schools in Britain were not reaching expected standards. 'The waste of talent and potential this represents simply isn’t acceptable for the future,' he said."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article2577874.ece

"Last year [2004], a report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) revealed that Britain came seventh from bottom in a league table of staying-on rates [in education and training] for 19 countries. Only Mexico and Turkey had significantly lower rates of participation for this age group. Italy, New Zealand, Portugal and Slovakia have marginally lower rates."
http://education.guardian.co.uk/gcses/story/0,16086,1555547,00.html

Unsurprisingly, an accessible piece in The Economist for 26 August 2006 showed that Britain is unusually well-endowed with low-skilled young people compared with other major European economies:
http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7843638

Compared with those major factors, the continuing dominance of Oxbrige in British academia is a relatively incidental issue. I'm ancient enough now to be able to say that while in my experience the best products of Oxbridge are very good indeed, the average is much like the average in other Russell universities. I'm currently active in the local branch of the University of the Third Age as a discussion leader for a lively group on Current Affairs, which is now in its sixth year with a group membership that has changed little during that time.

Btw as for the value of degrees, the premium earnings that graduates can attract seems to have proved resilient against the huge increase in the numbers attending universities to read for first degrees since I went up to university 50 years ago when only 4% of my age group went into HE:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6999510.stm

[dearieme]

Katherine, "Your examples assume that the admission bod is always male and heterosexual": not at all. You admit the younger male because at Uni admissions age males are still immature, so if the two candidates are equally matched, you choose the one with more room for further development. The girls tend to be more mature so you admit the prettier because she will in future (a) attract more boy applicants to your department/College/Uni, it being known for pretty girls, and (b) attract more pretty girl applicants, since girls like the implication that if they got in, it might well be because they're pretty. When I put my "choose the prettier" idea to a Cambridge Admissions Tutor of my acquaintance, she said "Oh yes, and it's so much easier to find Supervisors for pretty girls". Conclusive.

[dearieme]

Katherine, "Your examples assume that the admission bod is always male and heterosexual": not at all. You admit the younger male because at Uni admissions age males are still immature, so if the two candidates are equally matched, you choose the one with more room for further development. The girls tend to be more mature so you admit the prettier because she will in future (a) attract more boy applicants to your department/College/Uni, it being known for pretty girls, and (b) attract more pretty girl applicants, since girls like the implication that if they got in, it might well be because they're pretty. When I put my "choose the prettier" idea to a Cambridge Admissions Tutor of my acquaintance, she said "Oh yes, and it's so much easier to find Supervisors for pretty girls". Conclusive.

[Will]

What a load of fucking wank this post is.

Good to see this blog has descended to the level of the pit of shit that marks out Comment is Fucking Worthless for the pit of shit that is.

"An extremist, not a fanatic" -- oh fuck off and piss off when you come back.

A silly, shitty, dumb as fuck 'provocative' post with retarded right wing loonies commenting. What a shock. Not.

Of course, most of the time, Dillow, you are merely saying 'oooo look how clever I am'! You should stick to doing that -- you thick fucker.

A Marxist and working class... yeah right. Fuck off you prick. Go see Kamm and give that fucker a good blowing.

[Will]

And just noticed -- you have in your 'Top Blogging' links a link back to Peter on the cuts to adult education.

http://fatmanonakeyboard.blogspot.com/2007/10/more-on-cuts.html

Are you taking medication or something more extreme? Fuck ing hell. Matron! Get the coat!

[DOCTOR PETER TEIMAN FRANKLIN]

DOCTOR PETER TEIMAN FRANKLIN here,
Universities have always been elitist, whether they want to admit it or not.
DR PETER TEIMAN FRANKLIN
Sweden

[Peter]

Thank you Charlie Whittaker for tackling the mythology head on, not that anyone seems to be listening. These beliefs float around the political and administrative elites. I have heard them repeated often and they have done huge damage, especially when governments are looking to save money.

Dr Franklin - Universities certainly have been elitist but that doesn't mean that either they should be or need to be. However, there are parts of Universities, especially Lifelong Learning departments, where the opposite is the case now. And that is the bit that is most under threat at the moment.

And Will - love you man!

[John M]

"Of course, most of the time, Dillow, you are merely saying 'oooo look how clever I am'! You should stick to doing that -- you thick fucker."

It's like the spirit of Oscar Wilde, living again on the internet. Marvellous.

[Matt Munro]

I did an OU degree, lots of teachers, lots of sex obsessed heavy smokers. Summer school at Durham was like a survival course in sleep deprivation and alcohol abuse, don't attempt if over 35.

And it is the preserve of "the better off" if if you define better off as having a non manual job and an employer who will pay the fees and give you time off for exams etc. There wasn't a chav in sight.

[dearieme]

There wouldn't be a chav, would there? When Labour founded the OU, they knew who their pet interest groups were.

[Igor Belanov]

I think that the whole point is that 'chavs' wouldn't want to study anything anyway. Do you suggest that the OU drags them off at gunpoint to study degrees? Obviously to members of the middle-class all working-class people must be chavs. Plenty of ordinary people like the opportunity to study further after leaving education in the past, and this should be encouraged.

[Bob B]

In the new autodidact tradition, why bother to study boring academic subjects at school when:

"The average Premiership footballer earns a basic salary of £676,000, according to a survey published today [in April 2006]" ?
http://football.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/0,,1751542,00.html

Better to practise playing footie in the street and annoy the neighbours or go down to the park every evening.

Compare the pay of footballers with this from The Times on 14 August 2007 reporting the average pay for graduates by degree subjects:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/good_university_guide/article2253011.ece

I'm pleased to note that economists were up there near the top but on nothing like the pay of Premiership footballers.

In medieval England:

"Cause public proclamation to be made," declared an Act of 1369, "that everyone of said City of London strong in body, at leisure times and on holydays, use in their recreation bows and arrows." Popular amusements such as handball and football were banned on pain of imprisonment.
[See entry for "Archery" in Weinreb and Hibbert (eds): The London Encyclopaedia (1993)]

An interesting question: Why weren't the authorities of the City of London at the time worried about a lot of well-practised archers roaming around?

[dearieme]

"Why weren't the authorities of the City of London at the time worried about a lot of well-practised archers roaming around?" I suggest that the longbow is a fine weapon for massed archers mowing down cavalry in open space and therefore for defending a city from the nobility and royalty. It's rather a clumsy weapon for a small gang to use in narrow lanes and therefore not suited to murdering merchants and artisans. A class-specific weapon in fact: that'll please Dillowbert.

[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