Game of Wealth: How Education System Preserves Inequality
“The success of parents is the success of their children.”
That saying has gone and echoed for generations, pressuring parents across the globe to set a standard for their kids to achieve a more successful life. As an ambition per se, this is not a bad idea in wanting their children to do better than them, but at the same time it also gives off the toxic vibe of being helicopter parents who tend to overcontrol their kids (American Psychology Association, 2018). But now, the question that arises is: is it really toxic to be helicopter parents?
The answer is no, not nowadays.
The case in which it can best describe the outcome of becoming helicopter parents might be the current college admissions scandal that has shaken the whole United States’ educational system and has become a living proof on how the role in being parents is changing from a family role to a profession with children as their outputs. College admissions scandal has showed us that higher education is being valued to the point where wealthy parents are willing to pay millions of dollars so that their kids can go into the best schools. It also just doesn’t stop by paying millions, but they also don’t mind carrying out cunning conspiracies, like replacing athletes’ faces with their kids’ through photoshop. The most common reasoning behind this scandal would be those paranoid (and rich) parents are trying to guarantee the future of their kids to have at least the same level of richness. This comes at the expense of hoarding other kids’ dreams, particularly those who are unable to ‘pay’ that much of money to participate in this fraudulent scheme. To put it into an economic standpoint, this case has something to do with preserving the wealth of the already wealthy — in this matter, we must be familiar with the word inequality. So, what roles do inequality play in this game?
Game the System
Some of you might still be wondering why it’s not considered as toxic to be helicopter parents in this current society; the simple answer is because it is necessary to preserve their families’ social positions which are bestowed upon them by their ancestors. High-ranked universities are believed to be the most promising medium in sealing the position off of the wealthy in the future, given the ever-increasing value of higher education, in which sometimes is seen as a long-term investment for the parents. According to Harvard Business Review, graduates who spent four years in university will earn 168% more than high school graduates. If the case is altered to not just any universities, but rather the Ivies such as Harvard University, the earnings will go at an even more sterling amount. No wonder that these parents are willing to spend as high as 1.2 million dollars to bribe their kids’ way into the Ivies.
Every year, students from every high schools, both inside the U.S. and abroad, fight for their ways to get in those elite universities to the point where cram schools and pulling off an all-nighter will become their usual fashion. The problem is that those time and money you’ve spent on preparing for the admissions’ standardized test, such SAT or ACT in the U.S., won’t be valued as high if you are a middle or lower incomer. The fact is sometimes if you get rejected, it’s not because you are undeserving for the position but more because of from the very start the system is just skewed against you.
Prestigious universities have the system of accepting students based on legacy — besides accepting them through regular admissions’ process that require meticulous check on individual admissions’ form and test scores. Students are considered to be a part of legacy if their acceptance in the college is influenced by the history of their parents or relatives attending the same college. From 2009 to 2015, the rate of legacy students accepted in Harvard itself was nearly 34% — five times higher than the non-legacies. Some would say that there are at least two benefits inherent with accepting legacy students. First, they can donate more money to develop the institution and second, they can be the source of diversity where they will deem to live with ‘the Harvard (or insert any other elite college’s name) experience’ alongside those without it. The second benefit especially, is being questioned a lot as it is hard and kind of vague to determine the importance of having to preserve college’s culture by means of back-lane diplomacy. Other universities that accept more legacy students beside Harvard consist of Cornell University (22.1%), University of Chicago (19.7%), Princeton University (14%), and Yale University (11%).
It is indeed still being questioned whether donations can be a ‘fair enough’ reason to accept the legacy students because the meaning is pretty interchangeable with the word bribery. There is still this grey area in distinguishing between the two words since wealthy parents can just hide behind the veil of charity to bribe their kids’ way into those institutions and can still be reckoned as a form of meritorious donation. But either way, giving money to certain party, whether it’s donation towards the institution or bribing the exam administrator, postulate the same essence: if you possess wealth, you can buy (nearly) everything. Such capability may worsen the age-old problem of inequality.
The Root of It All: Inequality
Inequality might be the oldest problem this world ever had — it has been here for nearly 11.000 years and still persists until this very day. United States, with Gini coefficient counted for 0.39, is not having too much of a bad day in handling income inequality problem within its society according to the number. However, income inequality has proven to spur increase in wealth inequality and in the case of the U.S., wealth inequality becomes exceptionally arising over time with the top 1% wealth share rose from 22% (1940) to 34% (2014) (World Inequality Report, 2018). Considering that wealth is more concentrated than income, if this trend is established further, those who are in the top wealth alone will eventually gain more wealth than all middle class combined in 2050. In the wake of the college admissions scandal, this too shall not be a good sign because the more concentrated the wealth is, it will be possibly harder for people to mobilize upward intergenerationally.
Furthermore, besides talking about inequality in terms of overall wealth, we have to be aware also of the existence of inequality within the admissions process. Daniel Golden, author of “The Price of Admission”, said that those best-schools indeed put more preferences toward the wealthy. As once he put it that based on economic diversity, it is already considered as the least diverse element in the admissions since it only counts for 3% to 11% of applicants that come from the lowest economic quartile. Don’t get shocked too soon though, because all the talks which claimed elite universities will go for a more well-rounded student thus giving the chance for the less wealthy to catch-up with the criterion is proved to be mere talks. Instead, exceptional students with exceptional talent, let’s say in music, sports, you name it — will get more weight in their admissions’ applications. And we know it too well that to be someone whose exceptional, it won’t come in handy and cheap, we need to also pay for the trainers or the private lesson — another signal of privilege for the wealthy.
It’s like a never-ending vicious cycle of wealth circulation. It can be well said that our society is far better at preserving inequality than it is in preserving ocean which is overflowed with plastic.
The Goal of It All: More Inequality
So, what can we imply from wealth inequality above? It means that more people are witnessing stark differences between each social class — more people want to preserve its position in their current wealthy status if they are rich, as others that may not be as fortunate want to climb the social ladder as well. Getting less rich becomes scarier than it has ever been before and the competition to preserve it is getting higher, resulting in increasing willingness-to-pay for price to perpetuate the social order.
Once the United States was considered to be the land of opportunity, but the naked truth is it’s not anymore now (or ever?). The problem caused by previously elaborated inequality ends up producing more inequality. How so? Based on the study that calculated intergenerational mobility, the upward absolute mobility (children’s education compared with their parents’ education) in the U.S. has been declining from 90% for children born in 1940s to 50% for children born in 1980%. This condition is mainly due to the unequal distribution of economic growth, rather than the slowing pace of economic growth itself. It is very essential as if we want to reach an increasing number of upward mobility, we can’t just take into account the pace of economic growth, but also the way it is distributed. For now, a large fraction of GDP will go to higher-income household so that no matter how much of economic growth being incurred, it won’t change the current status quo if it’s not distributed evenly. Besides that, the decline in the United States’ equality distribution can also be attributed from the fact that globalization decreases return to uneducated labor (Kanbur, 2018).
In addition with that, as this world is already used with having the idea of social stratum that distinguishes the rich and the poor, the probability of poverty-to-privilege rate has been declining as well. This implication can come from the fact that the upward mobility rate itself is getting narrower, meaning that if we interpret it in terms of education attainment, it’s getting much harder for the bottom half kids to reach higher educational quartile than their parents.
To minimize further the downturn of admissions process, there has been an idea to just replace the current admissions process with another process known as the admissions lottery. So, the basic would be universities will determine first on the kinds of quality they seek from a student and then after it has been sorted out from that basic criteria, they will pick students randomly so that it will eliminate other factors not being included inside the criteria — just like a lottery. Besides eliminating the factor of wealth, it will also benefit students psychologically as they don’t have to stress about being treated unfairly just because the assessors will be more likely inclined toward the wealthy.
Seeing how the scandal is being unfolded in front of our eyes along with its cause and effect, we realize that we live in the world where the real meritocracy is, most of the time, considered as threat. This scandal can be a loud wake-up call for all universities, not just those in the U.S. but also all over the world, to reconsider their admissions’ system as it won’t just determine someone’s 4-year worth of education but also the future of social order and stability.
Oleh Sendy Jasmine Karunia Hadi | Kepala Divisi Kajian Kanopi 2019 | Ilmu Ekonomi 2017
References:
Arcidiacono, P. (n.d.). EXPERT REPORT OF PETER S. ARCIDIACONO: Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard (Rep. №14-cv-14176-ADB (D. Mass))
Chetty, Raj. et al. (2016, December). The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute in Income Mobility Since 1940. Retrieved April 8, 2019, from http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/abs_mobility_summary.pdf
Gabler, N. (2010, January 10). The college admissions scam. Retrieved April 8, 2019, from http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/01/10/the_college_admissions_scam/?page=3
Kochkodin, B. (2019, March 21). Notre Dame and Baylor Admit More Legacies Than Harvard and Yale. Retrieved April 8, 2019, from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-21/notre-dame-baylor-top-harvard-yale-for-most-legacies-admitted
Mathur, A. (2018, July 16). The U.S. Does Poorly On Yet Another Metric of Economic Mobility. Retrieved April 8, 2019, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-u-s-does-poorly-on-yet-another-metric-of-economic-mobility/#7a6987466a7b
OECD (2019), Income inequality (indicator). doi: 10.1787/459aa7f1-en (Accessed on 09 April 2019)
