Progressive activists often target the “1 percenters” in their activities.

However, with budget cuts and expensive perks, catering to students who are able to pay full tuition, as well as fees, books, board and “extras“,  makes economic sense. Allie Grasgreen of Insider Higher Ed summarizes the conclusions of a new book that makes a look at how colleges do business.

If you are a low-income prospective college student hoping a degree will help you move up in the world, you probably should not attend a moderately selective four-year research institution. The cards are stacked against you.

That’s the sobering bottom line of Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (Harvard University Press), a new book based on five years of interview research by Elizabeth A. Armstrong, an associate professor of sociology and organizational studies at the University of Michigan, and Laura T. Hamilton, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at Merced.

It’s not entirely the colleges’ fault, Hamilton says. Declining state and federal support and rising tuition have made it critical to recruit students who can pay more (and who continue to donate after they leave). But the out-of-state and affluent students attending these colleges are not in it for the academics – those students are going to the Harvards, Michigans and Berkeleys of the world.

The students who end up at Midwestern University – a pseudonym for the flagship institution where Armstrong and Hamilton follow a group of women through their college careers, from the dorm floor to a year post-graduation – are socially minded. Thus, to lure and keep those students, institutions have come to structure their academic and social frameworks in a way that accommodates that population.

The result of this “party pathway” is more than just a substandard education for those students, whose significant family resources and connections — which set them up for jobs after graduation, regardless of credentials — allow them to take easy majors and spend as much time if not more drinking as they do studying. It also deters those on the “mobility pathway,” as those low-income students seeking entry into the middle class are both poorly supported and distracted by the party framework. As a result, many of these students struggle to succeed — meandering through college for six years or more — or drop out altogether.

Of the less privileged students Armstrong and Hamilton tracked, those who transferred to a regional university or community college were actually more successful than those who tried to stick it out at MU. Still, they were less successful career-wise than their more privileged peers, and not one of the six working-class students on Armstrong and Hamilton’s floor graduated within five years.