The Reproduction of Privilege

Thomas Edsall via a kind Steve Rankin email

Instead of serving as a springboard to social mobility as it did for the first decades after World War II, college education today is reinforcing class stratification, with a huge majority of the 24 percent of Americans aged 25 to 29 currently holding a bachelor's degree coming from families with earnings above the median income.

Seventy-four percent of those now attending colleges that are classified as "most competitive," a group that includes schools like Harvard, Emory, Stanford and Notre Dame, come from families with earnings in the top income quartile, while only three percent come from families in the bottom quartile.

Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce and co-author of "How Increasing College Access Is Increasing Inequality, and What to Do about It," puts it succinctly: "The education system is an increasingly powerful mechanism for the intergenerational reproduction of privilege."

These anti-democratic trends are driven in part by a supposedly meritocratic selection process with high school students from the upper strata of the middle class performing better on SAT and ACT tests than those from poor and working class families.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at March 14, 2012 2:08 AM
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