In 1994, Henry M. Levin and Carolyn Kelley published an article in the Economics of Education Review titled “Can Education Do It Alone?” Levin and Kelley argued that education is often tasked with solving societal ills that extend well beyond those observed in the classroom. Their central argument, namely that education can only reach its potential impact when other social conditions are met, remains as relevant today as it was three decades ago.

In Can College Level the Playing Field? Higher Education in an Unequal Society (Princeton University Press, 2022), Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson explore this theme as it relates to the role that higher education can play in mitigating inequality in the United States. Much like Levin and Kelley, Baum and McPherson underscore the high expectations many policymakers in the U.S. hold for higher education. Such policymakers contend that increases in college access and completion by themselves can help to reduce crime, increase civic participation, promote economic growth, and cut down on economic inequality. While higher education undoubtedly benefits both the individual and society, its potential influence should be more realistically framed as limited by political, social, and economic conditions.

Baum and McPherson are keenly aware of this and contextualize the impact of higher education with declines in union membership, increases in income and wealth inequality, limitations in social safety net programs, and the ubiquity of poverty and structural racism. Each of these factors not only hinders the potential for college to act as an equalizing force in society but also contributes greatly to stratification within higher education: students from the highest quintile of family income are nearly three times as likely to attend very selective colleges compared to students from the lowest income quintile (p. 62).

Under current conditions, higher education, in fact, appears to be reproducing inequality far more than leveling the playing field, as several other authors have convincingly argued. See, for example, Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999); Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (Penguin, 2019); Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020); Anthony Carnevale, Peter Schmidt, and Jeff Strohl, The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America (The New Press, 2020); and Adrian Woolridge, The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World (Allen Lane, 2021).

After taking stock of some of the many issues that contribute to stratification in access to higher education as well as inequalities post-college, Baum and McPherson consider what colleges and universities can do to push back against the tide of growing inequality and detail a number of policy directions they deem to be the most promising.

In particular, Baum and McPherson challenge the role of for-profit institutions. They note that Black and Hispanic students and, more generally, students from low-income families are more likely to enroll in such institutions. They moreover document that such institutions achieve lower completion rates for students. Yet their discussion falls short of a wholesale repudiation of the privatization of higher education over the past several decades that is well documented by Wendy Brown in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Zone Books, 2015) and Christopher Newfield in The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).

Privatization trends, after all, include but are not limited to the failure of many states to restore higher education funding to pre-recession levels, rising tuition at private and public colleges alike, the declining purchasing power of Pell Grants, and the increasing financial pressure that private and federal loans impose on students. Baum and McPherson instead choose to focus on more technocratic policy solutions that they argue can help limit some of the more deleterious outcomes of our current system of higher education.

In this NCSPE excerpt from their book, Baum and McPherson offer policy recommendations to promote degree completion among students attending broad-access institutions, namely non-selective two- and four-year public colleges. Despite educating the majority of students in higher education, and especially students from less privileged backgrounds, broad-access institutions receive less per-student funding than more selective public institutions. Baum and McPherson advocate for greater funding parity across public institutions and outline, in general terms, how federal matching or competitive grant programs can achieve this goal without reducing funding levels for more selective public colleges.

Gaps in per-student funding across tiers of selectivity for public institutions is a long-standing issue, and one that deserves attention. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that graduation rates are significantly lower at community colleges and less-selective public four-year institutions, given whom these institutions serve coupled with inadequate funding. Baum and McPherson are right to push for more resources for these institutions, but their recommendations are far from reorienting quality higher education as a necessary public good.

While the authors allude to social spillovers of higher education, their framing of college as a public good is limited. Individual returns to college by way of earnings premiums are referenced more frequently than non-pecuniary and social returns. Moreover, Baum and McPherson give more weight to increasing Pell Grants and reforming income-driven repayment plans than they do to reducing tuition itself. The policy levers that Baum and McPherson advocate most strongly for would not fundamentally alter the federal government’s role as a lender rather than funder of higher education.

Baum and McPherson’s policy prescriptions do not help to transcend common debates in higher education finance, such as whether student loan forgiveness is progressive or regressive or whether tuition-free public college is politically or economically viable. The authors are also well aware that higher education alone cannot solve the many societal problems we wish it to. Still, their arguments and policy recommendations lend themselves to healthy discussions of how higher education can help to mitigate social stratification and what an affordable and accessible system of public higher education in the US might look like.

Daniel Sparks
Research Associate, NCSPE
September 26, 2023