The class divide at elite universities

Scandals of Higher Education - The New York Review of Books

A review of some recent books and a discussion about campus policies as they relate to wealth (or lack of wealth) and college recruiting and admissions. Here are a few exerpts:

Campus liberals far prefer the soft issues of racial and gender diversity to such hard issues as the effect on American working families of cheap foreign labor or the gross inequities of a public school system funded by local property taxes, or, closer to home, the failure of their own institutions to recruit and support more talented students with no money. I have met very few faculty members who, even as they agitate for far-flung social causes, care to look closely at the admissions policies of their own institutions.

Our colleges and universities are following rather than resisting the national trend toward a widening disparity between rich and poor. This is true not only in how colleges admit their students, but in their internal structure (presidential compensation has crossed the million-dollar threshold in several cases), and in the wealth of leading institutions relative to their competitors (the annual return on Harvard's $30 billion endowment now exceeds the entire endowment of some of its Ivy League rivals).

I'm sorry for what my people did to your people
It was a nasty job
Please note the change of attitude
On the bumper of my Saab.