[Part I defines OASWAP and quantifies the displacement. Part II focuses on displacement into California. Here in this final Part, I consider the consequences]
Consequences of Displacement, California Edition
- Among applicants, a virtuous circle, with regard to current perceptions of Berkeley and UCLA as elite schools.
It will become harder and harder to get into Berkeley and UCLA—acceptance rates will continue to drop, as they have been for several years. Rates may begin to approach, and even surpass, those seen in the Ivy League and among top-ranked liberal arts schools—Berkeley is already on a par with Cornell and Williams for acceptance rates, although not (yet) at the level of Pomona and Brown, much less Stanford. On the Groucho Marx principle, of not wanting to “belong to any club that will have me,” the harder it is to get into Berkeley and UCLA, the more elite and prestigious they will come to seem.
- Among UC alumni, in the short term, increased pride in their school, as the scarcity value of their degrees appears to increase. Increased pride will lead to increased support, financial and otherwise, spinning the virtuous circle a little faster, as UC Berkeley and UCLA become even better resourced than at present.
Even today, it’s been argued that US News rankings are biased against public universities, with their necessarily skimpier resource base (A Williams or an Amherst has a million dollars of endowment for each student, compared to about $130,000 per student at Berkeley). If Berkeley and UCLA are better schools than their current rankings indicate, then as the virtuous circle of elite reputation spins, throwing off more resources, we can expect to see Berkeley climb further within the top 20, and UCLA to climb into it, public or no.
- Among UC alumni, their future children, and their surrounding social circle, over the long term we may see increased commitment to and support for public university education generally, and a slow estrangement from private university education, “back East.”
Today six of the top eleven public universities are in California, two are in Virginia, and no other state has more than one in the top 20. For that matter, thirty-six states have no public university among the top 20. When it comes to the role and prominence of public versus private university education, California is already one of a kind.
California, and the West Coast—Berkeley’s reputation is strong in Oregon and Washington too—have long made up a distinct cultural region within the American tapestry. Growing commitment to public university education, and the likely increased proportion of public university graduates among the movers and shakers and the professional and managerial class within California, will contribute further to the psychographic separation between California and the rest of the nation, particularly Northeast power centers, where the proportion of public to private university graduates is reversed.
- Among California high school graduates, for all but the superstars, and excepting students of color, a decreased interest in applying to elite colleges back East.
The great thing about social systems: every factor pertinent to social status becomes known, sooner or later. Today, every OASWAP in California knows that application numbers are way up, and acceptance rates way down, at every prestigious college anywhere in the nation. With the insouciance of youth, they apply anyway. What hasn’t yet penetrated public consciousness is the gist of this essay: that acceptance rates for OASWAP, at certain colleges, are not so much down, as effectively zero. As fewer and fewer California high school students know of anyone in their social circle who got accepted into any elite college back East, fewer and fewer will engage in a concerted effort to apply back East. Of course many will send out an application to Harvard, maybe, along with the obligatory application to Stanford, but a concerted effort to apply broadly across a dozen schools, particularly the smaller liberal arts colleges, however highly ranked, becomes less likely. The change will be slow, for as long as there continue to be OASWAP parents in California who themselves went to school back East, and encourage their children to do the same. But that population will ebb, if I am correct about these consequences.
Only OASWAP in states where there is no flagship public university will sustain an extensive application process across a dozen or more elite schools back East, however faint the hope. These students have no other choice, except to get off the prestige merry-go-round altogether.
- Among California employers, a decreased interest in recruiting back East, and no interest at all in recruiting at elite liberal arts colleges there.
Of course Silicon Valley employers will still swing by MIT and Carnegie-Mellon; but will they stop at Brown and Cornell? Princeton? Make a swing through western Massachusetts, to stop at Williams, Amherst, and Smith? Perhaps no more.
Students attending liberal arts colleges may not have vocational aspirations, of course; the goal may be to study Law, or later apply to MBA school. Ivy League law schools will continue to favor Ivy League undergraduates. Wall Street firms will continue to favor elite college graduates. Graduates of elite colleges will not lack for opportunities, except for maybe out West.
Nonetheless, at the margin, if California employers recruit less back East, California students will have one less incentive to attend school back there; and a vicious circle kicks in, as fewer Californians going to school back East, and aching to return, means even fewer employers going back East to recruit; which produces fewer East Coast alumni in the firm, and less push to recruit back East.
- Among the elite colleges themselves, there may be … no consequences at all, in terms of social prestige.
Most applicants, in most states, don’t have a Berkeley or a UCLA as a backstop. Even with near zero odds, OASWAP in these states will continue to apply, for the same aspirational reasons as always. And there won’t be any shortage of applicants from California, either, since California produces lots of the academic 1%, and lots of students of color.
This “no consequences” argument is strongest at the mostly highly regarded Ivy league schools; it applies to Harvard and Yale more than Brown and Penn. It applies best at the very strongest liberal arts colleges too—to Pomona and Swarthmore, but maybe not to Oberlin.
For smaller schools at the margin of the golden circle of elite reputation, much depends on whether the student protests of 2015 die down, or flare hotter. What ultimately protects the standing of elite schools is the thousands and thousands—tens and tens of thousands, in some cases—of applications they receive each year, in excess of their capacity. That abundance gives schools freedom to engage in social engineering, and design the entering class however they wish, without any negative effects on reported statistics for test scores etc.
*Even if students of color had uniformly lower test scores—which they do not—no school reports the standard deviation, kurtosis, and skewness of test scores for their entering class. Therefore, any desired SAT average, or targeted 25th / 75th percentile score levels, can be achieved, given a bimodal distribution that combines academic one percenters with a population of weaker scorers. Applicants and their parents will assume a normal or flat distribution (how many even know the term kurtosis?), and never guess that the middle has been hollowed out. And with enough applications, even the bimodal distribution need not occur. If the school has applications from ten 95th percentile applicants, and space for only one, it can choose a student of color over the other nine, if they are OASWAP, every time. Then there will be no change in any statistical parameter of the school’s admission statistics, even as class demographics get sculpted exactly as desired.
With no visible change in reported test statistics—the entering class looks just as elite as past years—there will be no change in perceived desirability, and hence, no reduction in applications, which will allow the social engineering to continue. Unless the combination of student protests, and feckless administrative response, were to produce a negative perception, and a corresponding drop in applications. This threat, again, falls heaviest among schools at the edge of the golden circle of elite reputation.
Anyone remember Antioch College? Although colleges, like all institutions, tend to persist indefinitely, individual schools are always vulnerable to a catastrophe flip.
Speculations
These first six consequences are straightforward sociological inferences. I conclude with some more speculative inferences, developed informally. First, does the displaced OASWAP—especially one displaced several steps down the elite hierarchy—become a Donald Trump supporter? Second, consider the Asian-American parent of an OASWAP. His daughter, who does not represent herself as a student of color, had test scores above the 75th percentile at every elite college where she applied; but she was accepted at none. He absorbs, or formulates for himself, the explanation offered in this essay. Does this parent-voter continue to support affirmative action, broadly construed?
Third, and more speculative: let’s suppose that the typical elite school does end up with a bifurcated student body, consisting first of individuals selected for their group identity, who tend to have test scores that are strong, but below the 99th percentile; and second, students selected for their extraordinary achievements, extra-curricular and academic, often with scores well above the 99th percentile. The second group will in turn tend to be children of the societal one percent, where exceedingly high socio-economic status buys the best high school education, curricular and extra-curricular, that money can buy.
In the old days, elite colleges would have contained a continuum of strivers, distributed among 1) the truly poor student, accepted for group identity reasons, back when affirmative action was new; 2) the not poor but not really established middle class striver, hoping to rise in the world; and 3) before as now, the true upper crust, scions of the one percent, far more advantaged and established than either of the first two groups. As used to be said about New York city, I speculate in this essay that the middle class will more or less be driven out of elite colleges, so that only the struggling and the exceedingly comfortable remain. Might that polarization explain some of the student protests that rocked campuses beginning in 2015? Elite colleges used to contain a continuum; what happens when such colleges only contain an upper crust, mostly white, and a very different population, different by every measure? Might an exacerbated alienation, in place of integration, be the expected rather than surprising result?
Caveats and limitations
Remember, the displacement effect is at the margins. Plus, it has already been occurring for some years. Pomona and Brown did not move to 50% students of color in a single jump; accordingly, much of the displacement has already taken place.
Second, the effect is invisible to the individual student and his or her family. Pomona and Brown reject so many applicants, that no OASWAP student can know, for certain, that they would have been accepted, under an earlier regime, even as they are not accepted, now. The effect is also nearly impossible for an external observer to document. No school publishes a three-way cross-tabulation of admits/rejects BY ethnicity BY test score groups. No need to go there!
Because the effect must be inferred, it is always possible that this post is badly mistaken, and that elite colleges have not displaced an entire population, defined here as OASWAP, or the plain vanilla A student.
Ideological bona-fides
Some readers may still be giving me the fish eye, as a racist, chauvinist, cis-gendered pig. Oh, well. I can be confident of not ever being invited on campus to give this talk; or, if invited, of having the invitation rescinded after students protest it.
For the record, I think it probable that the great increase in opportunity for students of color, most notably among the thin upper crust of American higher education, is, net net, a good thing for American society. The OASWAP student displaced to UC Berkeley will, in most cases, be little disadvantaged; but the student of color, up-placed from an obscure city or state university to an elite school, is likely to be greatly assisted in their life path—if they overcome the alienation described above, and graduate. And assuming they want to join the “neo-liberal hegemony,” as it is called, in which this elite hierarchy is embedded.
The premise of the essay is only that there has been a real change, and that the change will have multiple consequences, some anticipated and desired, many unanticipated, and maybe not desired. Either way, why not examine the change, and consider its implications?
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