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A review by rbruehlman
The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us by Paul Tough
4.0
I've always been interested in college education and standardized test scores, I suppose because I noted while growing up in a wealthy town that both seemed to define your worth. Going to college wasn't optional; it was expected. It was town gossip if you didn't go or went to a "low-achievers'" college (everyone knew what those were). You could see the judgment on people's faces when they would ask you where you were applying to college--a fallen face and an "oh" if you weren't going anywhere particularly great, and an approving "wow, you must be smart" if you were. Grades were important, but the standardized test was the measure that torpedoed students' ambitions of going to Yale instead of University of Connecticut, or could eke high-scoring but lazy students a nice scholarship somewhere. College was simply what you did.
Meanwhile, I knew someone well--I'll call him Carlos--born and raised in Queens who enrolled at Hunter as a first-generation college student and promptly flunked out. His working-class family shrugged. Get a job so you can contribute to rent, or we're kicking you out, they said. Want to go back to college for a second go? Figure the financing out yourself, not our problem.
Our worlds couldn't have been more different. I was a late-blooming student who had failing grades freshman and sophomore year before I realized maybe bothering to do homework might be a good idea. Carlos was considered a decent student in the NYC public school system. It took him several years to get an associate's degree; I graduated on time.
Who failed?
Per The Inequality Machine, society did. The New York City public school system failed. Hunter College failed. Our politicians failed. To Carlos's credit, he persevered and got his degree; most students in his situation simply give up, saddled with student loans. But he was never set up for success to begin with--was it any surprise he was in over his head at Hunter? Was it his fault he was asked to write a paper and didn't know how, because you didn't really need to know how to do that to graduate from the New York City public schools as a poor Hispanic kid? Was it his fault navigating the student services for support felt as dystopian and bureaucratic as the DMV? I mean, you had to know student support services existed to begin with.
The Inequality Machine, a surprisingly engagingly-written book that deftly mixes facts with the personal stories of many poor and minority students, explores inequity in the United States' higher education system on multiple levels. Firstly, the disparity in who gets a degree vs. not creates inequity, because statistically speaking, it's very hard to earn a middle-class income on a high school diploma. Who even applies to a college represents inequity, because poor high-achieving students are more likely to apply to colleges that their less academically oriented peers of similar income apply to, instead of schools matching their academic caliber. Who gets in to a college represents inequity, because household income tracks highly with SAT scores (chicken-or-the-egg problem). Who stays and succeeds at college is also representative of inequity, because poor students are often ill-prepared from substandard K-12 schooling and feel out-of-place culturally.
Inequity in higher education is a problem that simply compounds itself. And, Tough notes, colleges aren't exactly incentivized to ameliorate the issue. Why admit the high-achieving poor kid when you could admit a just-okay student who will pay full tuition? Why not offer merit aid to high-scoring wealthy kids to boost your average admitted students' SAT score, and thereby increase your college ranking? While higher education has plenty of well-intentioned people who really want to help, ultimately the institutions are handcuffed to managing a ballooning budget and jockeying for the best possible US News Best Colleges ranking. There are too many perverse incentives, and it shows with how stubbornly unchanged student bodies are.
The Inequality Machine highlights not just real issues, but also the various interventions that have succeeded or catastrophically failed, and why. Overall, even the well-intentioned ways colleges have tried to be more equitable don't really solve the problem. Attempts to get high-achieving low-income students to apply to more selective schools is actually really difficult and has resisted various forms of remediation. Arguably, as echoed by many of the people Tough interviews, students often don't believe they're capable of succeeding, or, even more often, don't see themselves fitting in culturally at colleges where they see so few poor or minority people like them. Of the black students at highly selective colleges, they're often high-income and frequently the children of African immigrants, a fact not unnoticed and in fact deeply alienating to poor black students. Poor minority students find themselves statistical anomalies at selective colleges.
What does work? Tough believes it's intensive support, academically and psychologically. Intervention is important. Poor students who didn't have the luxury of a good K-12 education may find themselves overwhelmed, ill-prepared or unable to know how to study effectively. Create small academic support groups. Remind them it's okay to struggle. Intentionally connect them to a peer community. Drop the SAT requirement; high school GPA is a better predictor of performance than SAT scores are, and easily gamed.
Overall, I think Tough gives a pretty exhaustive review of the state of higher education, and he does it in a very engaging way. I actually was fully expecting this book to be rather textbook-like and dry, but it was a quick, interesting read.
I do think the book had some misses, though. For one, he was extremely focused on highly-selective colleges. Why, he repeatedly explored, are there so few poor students at Princeton? Who cares about Princeton? Who cares about highly-selective colleges at all? I'm not saying Princeton should have practically no poor black students, but what about mid-tier colleges? It's a line of thinking I and so many of my peers subscribed to in high school--the more prestigious the college, the better. I couldn't name where any of my colleagues went to college, or even if they went at all.
And I don't care. College gets your foot in the door. You want students to go to a college that prepares them well, but does selectivity matter or rigor? I care more about rigor. Highly-selective colleges are, definitionally, a luxury resource; most people won't go to one, because that's kind of the point. When trying to tackle the higher education inequity problem, you will get way more bang for your buck improving the state of things at mid-tier colleges that accept lots of people. In Tough's defense, he does actually mention this line of thought, but it's a comparative drive-by mention.
Additionally, he barely really talked about the impact on major. I graduated with a completely useless degree (psychology). Many of my peers in the College of Arts & Sciences did as well. Back then, I had a romantic view of college--study what you love! As much as many academics would love to argue otherwise, college is clearly not actually valued by society as a liberal arts education to expand your mind--college in the 21st century is job training, point blank. We do no one any good by pretending otherwise. My father bitterly fought with me over my curriculum choices, arguing I should study something more practical. I'll concede; he was right. Luckily, I was able to get some interviews to "good" jobs by way of connections, and my major didn't matter in the end, but what would I have done if my background was less fortunate? Countless students got suckered by the "study what you love" mantra; it wasn't just me. Where you go to college doesn't particularly matter, but what you study sure does. I wouldn't be surprised if poor students take up STEM degrees far less often than wealthy students.
Finally, I disagree with Tough's premise that college should be for everyone, and we should increase college graduation rates in a vacuum. I disagree with this because of my prior-stated belief that college is actually job training. I don't have anything against art history, but if the point of college is to get a job you can support yourself with after, do we need more? Or should our focus be on giving people social mobility through trade schools, universities, on-the-job training and otherwise? Anyone who wants to go to college and do the work should have the opportunity to do so, but that shouldn't be the only path.
Meanwhile, I knew someone well--I'll call him Carlos--born and raised in Queens who enrolled at Hunter as a first-generation college student and promptly flunked out. His working-class family shrugged. Get a job so you can contribute to rent, or we're kicking you out, they said. Want to go back to college for a second go? Figure the financing out yourself, not our problem.
Our worlds couldn't have been more different. I was a late-blooming student who had failing grades freshman and sophomore year before I realized maybe bothering to do homework might be a good idea. Carlos was considered a decent student in the NYC public school system. It took him several years to get an associate's degree; I graduated on time.
Who failed?
Per The Inequality Machine, society did. The New York City public school system failed. Hunter College failed. Our politicians failed. To Carlos's credit, he persevered and got his degree; most students in his situation simply give up, saddled with student loans. But he was never set up for success to begin with--was it any surprise he was in over his head at Hunter? Was it his fault he was asked to write a paper and didn't know how, because you didn't really need to know how to do that to graduate from the New York City public schools as a poor Hispanic kid? Was it his fault navigating the student services for support felt as dystopian and bureaucratic as the DMV? I mean, you had to know student support services existed to begin with.
The Inequality Machine, a surprisingly engagingly-written book that deftly mixes facts with the personal stories of many poor and minority students, explores inequity in the United States' higher education system on multiple levels. Firstly, the disparity in who gets a degree vs. not creates inequity, because statistically speaking, it's very hard to earn a middle-class income on a high school diploma. Who even applies to a college represents inequity, because poor high-achieving students are more likely to apply to colleges that their less academically oriented peers of similar income apply to, instead of schools matching their academic caliber. Who gets in to a college represents inequity, because household income tracks highly with SAT scores (chicken-or-the-egg problem). Who stays and succeeds at college is also representative of inequity, because poor students are often ill-prepared from substandard K-12 schooling and feel out-of-place culturally.
Inequity in higher education is a problem that simply compounds itself. And, Tough notes, colleges aren't exactly incentivized to ameliorate the issue. Why admit the high-achieving poor kid when you could admit a just-okay student who will pay full tuition? Why not offer merit aid to high-scoring wealthy kids to boost your average admitted students' SAT score, and thereby increase your college ranking? While higher education has plenty of well-intentioned people who really want to help, ultimately the institutions are handcuffed to managing a ballooning budget and jockeying for the best possible US News Best Colleges ranking. There are too many perverse incentives, and it shows with how stubbornly unchanged student bodies are.
The Inequality Machine highlights not just real issues, but also the various interventions that have succeeded or catastrophically failed, and why. Overall, even the well-intentioned ways colleges have tried to be more equitable don't really solve the problem. Attempts to get high-achieving low-income students to apply to more selective schools is actually really difficult and has resisted various forms of remediation. Arguably, as echoed by many of the people Tough interviews, students often don't believe they're capable of succeeding, or, even more often, don't see themselves fitting in culturally at colleges where they see so few poor or minority people like them. Of the black students at highly selective colleges, they're often high-income and frequently the children of African immigrants, a fact not unnoticed and in fact deeply alienating to poor black students. Poor minority students find themselves statistical anomalies at selective colleges.
What does work? Tough believes it's intensive support, academically and psychologically. Intervention is important. Poor students who didn't have the luxury of a good K-12 education may find themselves overwhelmed, ill-prepared or unable to know how to study effectively. Create small academic support groups. Remind them it's okay to struggle. Intentionally connect them to a peer community. Drop the SAT requirement; high school GPA is a better predictor of performance than SAT scores are, and easily gamed.
Overall, I think Tough gives a pretty exhaustive review of the state of higher education, and he does it in a very engaging way. I actually was fully expecting this book to be rather textbook-like and dry, but it was a quick, interesting read.
I do think the book had some misses, though. For one, he was extremely focused on highly-selective colleges. Why, he repeatedly explored, are there so few poor students at Princeton? Who cares about Princeton? Who cares about highly-selective colleges at all? I'm not saying Princeton should have practically no poor black students, but what about mid-tier colleges? It's a line of thinking I and so many of my peers subscribed to in high school--the more prestigious the college, the better. I couldn't name where any of my colleagues went to college, or even if they went at all.
And I don't care. College gets your foot in the door. You want students to go to a college that prepares them well, but does selectivity matter or rigor? I care more about rigor. Highly-selective colleges are, definitionally, a luxury resource; most people won't go to one, because that's kind of the point. When trying to tackle the higher education inequity problem, you will get way more bang for your buck improving the state of things at mid-tier colleges that accept lots of people. In Tough's defense, he does actually mention this line of thought, but it's a comparative drive-by mention.
Additionally, he barely really talked about the impact on major. I graduated with a completely useless degree (psychology). Many of my peers in the College of Arts & Sciences did as well. Back then, I had a romantic view of college--study what you love! As much as many academics would love to argue otherwise, college is clearly not actually valued by society as a liberal arts education to expand your mind--college in the 21st century is job training, point blank. We do no one any good by pretending otherwise. My father bitterly fought with me over my curriculum choices, arguing I should study something more practical. I'll concede; he was right. Luckily, I was able to get some interviews to "good" jobs by way of connections, and my major didn't matter in the end, but what would I have done if my background was less fortunate? Countless students got suckered by the "study what you love" mantra; it wasn't just me. Where you go to college doesn't particularly matter, but what you study sure does. I wouldn't be surprised if poor students take up STEM degrees far less often than wealthy students.
Finally, I disagree with Tough's premise that college should be for everyone, and we should increase college graduation rates in a vacuum. I disagree with this because of my prior-stated belief that college is actually job training. I don't have anything against art history, but if the point of college is to get a job you can support yourself with after, do we need more? Or should our focus be on giving people social mobility through trade schools, universities, on-the-job training and otherwise? Anyone who wants to go to college and do the work should have the opportunity to do so, but that shouldn't be the only path.