These kinds of papers make me crazy, a point to which I will return (or not!) when I am less rushed.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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!
So the entire premise is flawed, however impressive the underlying data, because of unrealistic assumptions about the types of institutions that colleges are.
Were this research that was unlikely to generate substantial policy conversation, it wouldn’t much matter.
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.
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
