Mandery & Dannenberg: Make elite colleges do the right thing
In late January, the town of Concord got a piece of news that quickly spread through the affluent community: The state had entered into an agreement with a local hotel, and would be setting up an emergency family shelter for homeless and migrant families in need of a place to stay.
Some residents wanted to know how they could help, and what would happen to long-term residents who reside at the hotel. Some wondered if the shelter’s occupants would clog traffic, overwhelm their schools, or threaten their safety. Residents and town officials alike said they were thrown off by the short notice and questioned whether renting the Best Western hotel was a long-term shelter solution.
From: Boston Herald
Excerpt:
To date, Harvard and its peers have paid no price for embedding aristocratic pathways into their admission systems that are antithetical to social and economic mobility. But a new proposal by Massachusetts Representative Simon Cataldo (D-Concord) and Senator Pavel Payano (D-Lawrence) would change the calculus.
Cataldo and Payano’s bill would charge a very small “public service fee” on the massive endowments of super-wealthy colleges that maintain legacy preferences, donor preferences, and binding early decision policies. The first two devices are obvious in their unfair tilt toward upper-class and generationally wealthy applicants. The third, binding early decision, effectively requires students to commit to a college before knowing their financial aid package, which means it’s really only for the well-off.
Under the young lawmakers’ plan, raised fees from super wealthy colleges that refuse to change are dedicated to support Massachusetts’ underfunded community colleges. These institutions, which educate approximately 45% of all college students, are true engines of opportunity.
Governor Maura Healey and legislative leaders have proposed making community colleges free for all needy students, including adults. Cataldo and Payano’s bill proposes a path to doing so for some 25,000 students without draining the state’s budget or taxpayers’ pockets a penny more.
Their sliding scale public service fee for most elite colleges is tiny based on endowment wealth per student; it ranges from one one-hundredth of one percent (0.01%) to two-tenths of one percent (0.20%) of total endowment wealth — with a minimum of $1 million for any school with an endowment over $1 billion. Based on its current endowment of over $53 billion, Harvard would face an annual fee of $103 million if it chooses to maintain unfair admissions practices that undermine diversity and socioeconomic mobility.
The Cataldo-Payano bill, which is the first of its kind in the nation, addresses an exploding opportunity gap in American higher education. At 38 “elite” colleges, more students come from the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom 60%.
