Updated at 11:20 a.m. ET on August 16, 2023
Earlier this month, the century-old Pac-12 athletic conference was swiftly and brutally eviscerated. In the space of a few hours, five member universities left for rival conferences offering massive paydays financed by TV-sports contracts. As Jemele Hill put it for The Atlantic, the shift “pits the long-term interests of schools and conferences against their own insatiable greed.”
Sports lovers are used to watching their favorite teams put money ahead of the wishes of their fans. That makes it easy to forget that this isn’t a story about professional-sports franchises—or, indeed, private entities of any kind. All five of the defecting schools are public universities: Washington, Oregon, Utah, Arizona, and Arizona State. The money grab in college football is just one symptom of a troubling strain in American public higher education. Many of our public universities, it turns out, don’t act very much like public institutions at all.
It’s natural to assume that public institutions of higher education would be more egalitarian than their private counterparts. In K–12, public school is free, while private school is expensive. But at the college level, the line between civic purpose and private profit doesn’t map so neatly onto the public/private divide. The clearest evidence to date comes from a recent blockbuster study by a trio of economists at Harvard’s Opportunity Insights project. Most media coverage has focused on the study’s analysis of the so-called Ivy Plus schools, where the researchers found that the wealthiest students get an admissions bump relative to other applicants with the same academic profile. Even among people with identical SAT scores, students from the top 0.1 percent of income are more than twice as likely to get into universities like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Public flagships such as UC Berkeley and the University of Virginia showed no such bias.
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But the researchers didn’t just study the tiny clique of elite universities that dominates the public discourse. Their sample included 139 institutions, including 50 public universities, and the results show a more complicated picture. Not all private schools are biased in favor of the rich—and some of the schools that cater most egregiously to the wealthy turn out to be public.
Like many aspects of life in our large, divided nation, the character of your local university depends a lot on where you happen to live. Big blue states such as New York and California have extensive, highly regarded university systems with no wealth bias in admissions. If anything, they have the opposite. The ultra-wealthy are almost 50 percent less likely to attend Berkeley than similarly qualified not-rich students. The trend applies throughout the University of California system, as well as campuses in the State University of New York. Although public-university budgets nationwide were devastated by the Great Recession, California and New York eventually restored the lost funding and invested even more. That gives them the resources to keep tuition low and creates fewer incentives to chase wealthy applicants. The sheer size of those systems also means that power and money aren’t concentrated in a single flagship university with aspirations of athletic greatness. SUNY at Stony Brook and UC Santa Barbara are both top-flight research universities, but nobody is paying big money for the broadcast rights to Stony Brook Seawolves or UCSB Gauchos football games; the latter team doesn’t even exist. There’s no deep-seated culture of rich athletic boosters, legacy admissions, and regional aristocracy surrounding these campuses.
The story is different in other states, especially in the South. Statistically, public universities such as Auburn University, the University of Mississippi, the University of Arkansas, and the University of Alabama look a lot like the Ivy Pluses in their approach to wealth and admissions. These schools are not highly selective—most people who apply are admitted—so the mechanism for exclusion works differently than at Princeton or Yale. To measure it, the Opportunity Insights researchers looked not just at admit rates but at whether applicants were likely to apply and attend, an approach that captures the whole process of marketing, recruitment, admissions, pricing, and enrollment. Their findings suggest that a college need not be ultra-elite to perpetuate class divides. Some public universities in the South serve the same function as private colleges and universities in the Northeast: destinations for the children of political leaders and wealthy businessmen, and a mechanism for transmitting that status to the next generation. Although Alabama has one of the highest poverty rates in America, only 11 percent of Auburn students qualify for a federal Pell grant. More than 30 percent of college-age Alabama residents are Black, yet Black students make up less than 5 percent of Auburn’s student body.
So if you’re wondering how public-university students in the South can afford $4,000 sorority-rush consultants, as The Wall Street Journal recently reported, it’s because their parents have money. If you’re curious about why so many rich kids are on campus, it’s because places like the University of Alabama give an effective 45 percent bump to the children of the top 1 percent. And if you want to know why few very low-income Black students attend these universities, it’s because the schools were originally built to sustain a racist power structure that kept Black people in poverty, and those legacies have not yet been overcome.
Representatives from the universities of Arkansas and Alabama both told me that they work hard to recruit and provide financial aid to low-income students in their respective states, which is true. Both say that income is not one of the official criteria that their admissions officers consider. But it doesn’t have to be, because a very efficient unofficial filter is at play. Most of the students attending schools like the universities of Arkansas and Alabama come from other places, meaning they pay out-of-state tuition. At Alabama, where 58 percent of undergrads come from elsewhere, that amounts to $32,400 a year, plus room and board. Students who can afford such a high sticker price are wealthy almost by definition, and they are vital to public-university finances. The University of Michigan charges out-of-state students more than $55,000, the same price as Harvard. Administrators are essentially running two institutions in parallel: a reasonably affordable public university for the residents of Michigan (in-state tuition: $16,736), and a very expensive private university for everyone else.
This dual identity shows up in the Harvard-study results. The richest and poorest students from Michigan get into Michigan at similar rates, controlling for test scores. For out-of-state students, however, there’s a marked lean toward the rich. Again, this works differently than it does at elite private universities. In the Ivy Plus schools, the pro-wealth bias is accomplished with a witches’ brew of legacy preferences, admissions bumps for patrician sports such as squash and sailing, and outright pay-to-play arrangements for mega-donors. At public universities, it’s a more straightforward downstream effect of pricing. Most out-of-state students get little or no financial aid, so only the rich can afford to enroll.
Universities defend these policies by arguing that wealthy students subsidize their poorer classmates, who don’t pay full price. But as the sociologists Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton describe in their groundbreaking 2015 book, Paying for the Party, the two-tier approach works out badly for first-generation and low-income students. Following two groups of undergraduates at Indiana University, they found that the wealthy out-of-staters sailed through four years of fraternity parties and weekend tailgates to graduate, marry, and start careers, while the first-gen students ended up with burdensome student loans, uncertain job prospects, and no degrees.
For some low-income students, the dream of attending a flagship public university turns sour. At Alabama, there’s an 18-percentage-point gap between the graduation rate of Pell-grant students and their more well-off peers, an unusually large disparity. Despite all of those out-of-state dollars, families earning less than $75,000 still pay about $20,000 a year in total costs to attend. Auburn’s numbers are similarly grim. The more public universities come to resemble private ones, the more they cater to the people who pay the bills. Consider the three mega-conferences that now dominate the college-football landscape, the SEC, Big 10, and Big 12. Michigan State, University of Florida, Purdue, University of Kentucky, Texas A&M: all big-time sports schools, all running the out-of-state full-tuition racket, all skewed toward the rich.
The gap between public universities that combat wealth inequality and those that seem to perpetuate it maps onto the red/blue divide, but only roughly. Higher education in America is also shaped by idiosyncrasies of history and geography. North Carolina, a purplish state, has a great, well-funded system of affordable public universities. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has no wealth preferences, nor does North Carolina State. (Duke University, right nearby, has that covered.) Pennsylvania, a fairly blue state, has an unusually lousy tradition of inadequate funding for public universities. Penn State charges non-Pennsylvanians $38,000 a year.
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One kind of university seems immune to all of these trends: science-and-engineering schools. Based on my analysis of the data, only five private universities in the Harvard study were less likely to admit applicants from the top 0.1 percent than comparably qualified middle-class students. Four of them—California Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Case Western Reserve University—have top-class engineering programs. Among the Ivy Pluses, MIT was the least corrupted by wealth preferences. Public universities such as the Georgia Institute of Technology, Virginia Tech, and the Colorado School of Mines also had more egalitarian results.
Even the most elite liberal-arts school can create an easy glide path to graduation for the dull-witted progeny of a deep-pocketed alum. Athletic recruits can famously go from start to finish at a big state school without encountering a single challenging idea along the way. Engineering schools, by contrast, have academic standards that are harder to evade. Martin Schmidt, the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic, came to the job after serving as provost at MIT. “There’s a phrase we used there,” he told me, about the rigorous math and science classes all students are required to take. “‘There’s nowhere to hide.’”
Of course, not every university can or should be devoted to math and science. But the existence of these respected engineering institutions—public and private, humble and world-renowned—shows that there’s nothing inevitable about higher-education systems that bend toward the gravity of wealth. If academic standards come first, the power of money recedes. Otherwise, colleges and universities become just one more thing to be bought and sold.
Due to an editing error, this article originally referred to Worcester Polytechnic Institute as Worcester Polytechnic University.
