Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 39

AMERICA'S AFFORDABLE
ELITE COLLEGES
Which selective schools give high-achieving, non-wealthy
students a break-and which break their bank accounts?
By Gilad Edelman
Compare the following two colleges:
Acceptance rate
25th-75th percentile
SAT math score
25th-75th percentile
SAT critical reading score
Median salary ten years
after entering college

COLLEGE A

COLLEGE B

56%

39%

590-680

610-690

650-730

580-660

$40,767

$57,188

College A, it turns out, is Sarah Lawrence, a liberal arts college located in the wealthy suburbs north of New York City.
College B is Baruch College, part of the City University of New
York system. Sarah Lawrence has all the trappings of an elite institution: national name recognition, beautiful brick buildings,
and a long list of famous alumni, from J. J. Abrams to Barbara
Walters. It's the kind of place people might think of when they
imagine the quintessential college experience.
Baruch? Not so much. It has no traditional campus and sits
in an unglamorous part of Midtown Manhattan. Nearly half of
its students are the first in their family to go to college. If you're
not from the New York area, you probably haven't heard of it at
all. Even if you are, you might think of it as a perfectly fine public
school, but not elite. And yet the two colleges are quite comparable academically.
Here's where they're not comparable at all: cost. The average student from a household making less than $75,000 a year
will pay a net price of $24,682 per year to attend Sarah Lawrence.
At Baruch, the same student will pay $4,128. (Almost all students
at Baruch pay in-state tuition.)
If you're surprised to learn that a more prestigious and expensive college is arguably less selective than a public commuter
school, don't feel too bad. (Selectivity includes acceptance rates,
but also the academic qualifications of incoming students.) It's
how we've been trained to think about higher education in this
country. With thousands of colleges in the United States, and so
many factors by which we could potentially judge them, we tend
to fall back on vague indicia of prestige and name recognition.

In other words, we-especially, but far from exclusively, people
from well-to-do backgrounds-tend to think of "good schools"
as the places where rich people send their kids. That goes a long
way to explaining why so many people are capable of looking at
a place like Baruch, a highly selective college that produces good
outcomes for students for an incredibly low price-where, in fact,
Pell Grant-eligible students (a shorthand for low-income) are an
amazing 8 percent more likely to graduate than other students-
and think it's somehow "worse" than Sarah Lawrence.
Selectivity is at the heart of most conversations about college quality. But, during the fifteen years that the Washington
Monthly has published its college rankings, we have proudly paid
very little attention to selectivity. Why? Because the media's obsession with simplistic and, in many cases, easily gamed measures of prestige has had deeply unfortunate consequences for
American higher education by encouraging institutions to plow
attention and resources into the things that matter to the U.S.
News & World Report rankings-standardized test scores, faculty salary, expert opinion (that is, brand recognition)-instead of
trying to help more students, especially disadvantaged ones, get
a quality education.
That's not to say selectivity doesn't matter. It does. Research shows that going to a more selective school has a big impact on future earnings for students whose parents are poor or
didn't go to college themselves. In fact, as damaging as our obsession with prestige can be, the real scandal of elite academia is
the fact that a huge proportion of the most talented, qualified
low-income students don't even apply to selective colleges-
often because they don't think they can afford to go.
That's why, for the first time in five years, we've brought
back our "affordable elite" ranking. We took the 208 most selective colleges and universities in the country, according to Barron's Profiles of American Colleges, and ranked them according to
a combination of metrics, including net price and students' future earnings, that track how well they promote income equality and upward social mobility. (Net price means tuition and
fees, plus room and board and other expenses, minus financial
aid. Last year, the average for all full-time students at four-year
Washington Monthly

Washington Monthly - September/October 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2019