College Doesn’t Make Everyone Equal
In his regular New York Times column yesterday, Ross Douhat examined college and equality through the filter of two books.
College, the Great Unequalizer
NO doubt by now you’ve finished last month’s assigned reading, Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” for our spring-semester course on Stratification in America. I’m sorry about the length (and the Amazon back-order problem), but I’m sure that the 696 pages of inheritance-data analysis and Émile Zola references flew by. And the good news is that you don’t need to worry about the term paper, because my fellow Elite Media Pundits and I have written about 330,000 words on the book that you can just crib, copy and repurpose.
The other good news is that your next assignment is much shorter — only 344 pages this time. Also, it’s possibly a little sexier than Piketty (his shirt-unbuttoned photos notwithstanding), with fewer equations and a little more human interest.
The title is “Paying for the Party,” and the subtitle is “How College Maintains Inequality.” (I can tell, you’re waking up already.) The authors, Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton, and a team of researchers embedded themselves in a freshman dormitory at an unnamed high-profile Midwestern state school and then kept up with a group of female students through college and into graduate or professional life.
Their project, as conceived, was supposed to be about sex and romance. In the end, though, it turned out to be mostly about class.
That’s because what the authors discovered were the many ways in which collegiate social life, as embraced by students and blessed by the university, works to disadvantage young women (and no doubt young men, too) who need their education to be something other than a four-year-long spree. Instead of being a great equalizer, “Paying for the Party” argues, the American way of college rewards those who come not just academically but socially prepared, while treating working-class students more cruelly, and often leaving them adrift.
Comments
There is no way to achieve outcome equality or social class equality by attending college. There is no way to have any sort of equality when we all have different ambitions, wants, needs, gifts and weaknesses. Life creates inequality and it is what we do with it and achieve in spite of it that matters. Students get what they want out of college. It isn’t east to refrain from self-destructive activities because those activities seem to be the most fun until the consequences kick in. No matter what the social science experiment is, it will always fail to capture what is really going on because it is difficult to control all the variables of complex situations. I would have told those authors to take a hike because I would have been too busy to participate and my life was none of their business. I think the the subject matter was too large for the authors to tackle and there seems to be an unrealistic expectation for what college is supposed to do for the students.