Colleges and universities, especially ivy league ones, make a point of accepting the “best and brightest” students. But what if they’re missing a whole slew of the best and brightest because of socioeconomic barriers? 

Evan Mandery is a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. He’s a leading expert on the death penalty but has also been an outspoken critic of elite college admission practices. His most recent book, Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us, looks at the social inequity created by some of these practices, like legacy admissions. 

Evan and Greg discuss the steps colleges could take to socioeconomically diversify their classes, why these inequities exist in the first place, and how public universities compare to their Ivy peers when it comes to admission practices. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The different buckets of college admissions

27:44: The way I conceptualize college admissions is there are like these different buckets that are being filled. You have the athletics bucket, which I don't think people get this. It's huge. And you have the legacy bucket. You have the donor bucket and the children bucket, you know, children of staff and faculty. And so, what you're having is like a "fair competition" for like a third of the slots. And, that's why it's restricted. So the only way this is going to change is either they expand capacity without adding another alpine skiing team or something like that. Or they're going to have to diminish their commitment to those, to reduce the size of some of those inequitable buckets.

The trade-off of increasing spending per student

51:34: As we increase spending per student, we make it more expensive to let in socioeconomically disadvantaged students. This disparity is staggering.

How elite colleges are selling the perception that they have the best and the brightest

10:54: Elite colleges have done a great job of selling the perception that they've identified the best and the brightest. And that is a lot of what the brand is. It's very damaging because I always hasten to say that meritocracy is a double-edged sword. If you say Harvard, Yale, and Princeton students are the best and brightest, you mean everybody else is the worst and dumbest.

What’s wrong about ranking?

19:38: I don't think there's anything inherently wrong about rankings, but they make no effort whatsoever to measure what's actually going on in the classroom. Everything that they're measuring is a proxy for wealth.

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