Okay, a more coherent response to this paper. I say this with respect for the intent of the research as well as admiration for the analytical effort behind this massive project.
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The reason I find it fundamentally problematic is that it provides a false precision in thinking about a counterfactual world in which students’ matching with colleges takes place without regard to their family’s income.
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(That is, it’s a world in which middle-class students with high test scores are just as likely to attend very selective colleges as wealthy students with high test scores.)
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The argument is that this would promote intergenerational income mobility substantially because more selective schools produce student with higher earnings, even conditional on background characteristics.
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Indeed, the claim is that this would reduce intergenerational income persistence by about 25%. But to make such a claim, one has to entirely ignore colleges as organizations.
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For both financial and status reasons, it is entirely unrealistic to imagine that colleges are going to replace large numbers of their wealthy, able-to-pay students with less-wealthy, financial-aid-requiring students.
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Moreover, if they did, they would be fundamentally different institutions that would not necessarily provide middle-class students with access to high-paying jobs. The elite networks that make that happen would be gone!
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So the entire premise is flawed, however impressive the underlying data, because of unrealistic assumptions about the types of institutions that colleges are.
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Were this research that was unlikely to generate substantial policy conversation, it wouldn’t much matter.
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But because this work is so high-profile, it disseminates a powerful narrative: that issues of inequality and declining social mobility do not require structural change or redistribution to be addressed effectively.
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Instead, it suggests that inequality can be sufficiently addressed through technocratic (but in reality completely impossible) fixes – a message that is unthreatening to elites, but that is ultimately untrue. /fin
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End of conversation
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