“For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in.” The New York Times, July 24, 2023.

Maybe it’s because I still carry a chip on my shoulder that the recent report from researchers at Opportunity Insights, struck a disillusioning chord with me. I managed to attended a perfectly good public university, but as a teenager, I had grander plans for myself and my education. My father died suddenly at the beginning of my senior year of high school, just as we were talking about where I might attend college. In fact, it was the last conversation we had before he died of a heart attack the next day. As a reminder, in the 1970’s , living in a steel town and from a lower middle-class family, you weren’t prepped for college while still in diapers.

The only college application I made was to the massive public university a few hours away from my home because friends from my high school were going there, and I knew I could hitch rides home for the holidays. I also could get tuition and room and board paid in full through a work-study program, because after my father’s death, our family had no income except Social Security. At the time I applied in early 1976, this university accepted everyone who graduated from an Ohio high school and was still breathing when they arrived on campus. If I knew enough at the time to apply elsewhere, could I have been accepted to an “elite”, private college, and if I had, would I have succeeded?

I’ll never know the answers to those questions, but what is important today is that students from low income backgrounds simply don’t have the same chance as the wealthy (generally defined as a family making $611,000 or more a year, and the ultra-rich or 1%, who earn millions or even billions each year) to attend a college with nationally and internationally known professors, smaller classes, more help to graduate, and obtain an advanced degree, and eventually higher paying, more influential career opportunities. Although there is a small percentage of students from poor or middle class families admitted to Ivy League colleges, for example, this recent study shows it is a disproportionate share of the wealthy and ultra-wealthy students (with similar test cores as their lower income peers) who attend these colleges.

It all comes back to money and wealth. Both government and the private sector, by their laws, policies and ways of thinking perpetuate both the cycle of poverty and the “amplification” of wealth and privilege —two sides of the same coin. This report and analyses lead me directly to student loan forgiveness, and to those who begrudge freeing a small portion of student loan debt in certain circumstances. Do you see how release of at least some student loan debt is an attempt to level the playing field and how much that forgiveness matters to students without the legacy of wealth?

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I’d love to hear your ideas on all of this, all sides. Please leave your thoughts in the Comment Section below to get the conversation started—thanks!

And as always…

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