Groucho Marx once famously said that he didn’t care to belong to any club that had people like him as members. I was reminded of this comment today in reading this article about this report, “Engines of Inequality: Diminishing Equity in the Nation’s Premier Public Universities,” recently released by the Education Trust.
As described on the web site of The Education Trust, the report finds that
[t]he nation’s 50 flagship universities serve disproportionately fewer low-income and minority students than in the past…. Students in the entering and graduating classes at these schools look less and less like the state populations those universities were created to serve.
And the article linked above reports:
More than half of the flagships received failing grades when the authors compared the percentage of black, Latino, and American Indian freshmen enrolled at each institution in fall 2004 with the percentage of those students among 2004 high-school graduates in those states
The article quotes one of the authors of the report, Kati Haycock, stating at a news conference on Monday that
the colleges engage in a “short-sighted pursuit” of selectivity at the expense of accessibility.
In short, the report gives the 50 flagship institutions low grades for not mirroring the racial and ethnic composition of their states, and calls them “short-sighted” for being selective, i.e., trying to get the best students.
Of course, if Berkeley and UCLA and Michigan and Virginia et. al. had open admissions, or something similar that would guarantee that their campuses mirrored the make-up of their states, they wouldn’t be “Premier” or “flagship” institutions any longer, would they?
If they extended invitations to the academic likes of Grouch Marx, he wouldn’t want to attend.
