The United States has a college-opportunity problem. University graduates earn higher lifetime wages and experience lower unemployment rates, but only about one-third of the population obtains a bachelor’s degree by age 29. While a higher education isn’t the right life path for everyone, there’s evidence that lots of people who should be getting degrees aren’t getting them.
So, here’s an idea: How about making college applications automatic?
It’s hard to overstate how damaging educational inequity can be. Left unchecked, it threatens to entrench class divisions and delegitimize the nation’s entire economic system.
Students with good test scores and low incomes are less likely to finish a degree than high-income students with bad scores.
Some believe there’s a simple solution: eliminate college tuition. Everyone knows it has soared in the last few decades. If people with low incomes are being shut out, price seems like an obvious factor to address. But thanks to need-based financial aid from both universities and the government, net public-university tuition is already very low for students from families with low incomes.
It’s hard to overstate how damaging educational inequity can be.
Eliminating tuition could thus even increase the college-completion gap, since most of the benefit would flow to students with above-average family incomes. Addressing costs for room and board and textbooks, which loom much larger for the lower-income brackets, would do more to equalize opportunity.
Policy also needs to address a huge and often ignored college expense – opportunity cost. Well-off kids don’t have to work to support their families, while poor kids often do. And kids from families with stable incomes and good health insurance are less likely to have to drop out to take care of sick relatives. These inequalities will never be fully eliminated, but they can be reduced by greater income support and universal health insurance.
Yet barriers other than cost also keep kids from realizing their educational potential. Economists Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery report that “the vast majority of very high-achieving students [with] low incomes do not apply to any selective college or university.” And economists Sandra Black, Kalena Cortes, and Jane Arnold Lincove found that even controlling for income, scholastic ability and many other factors, Hispanic high school students are significantly less likely than other ethnic groups to apply to college.
There’s no easy fix. So-called nudges, such as helping people complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, have worked only at small scale, but failed at larger scales. Something more is needed.
The best solution might be to make the college-application process universal. All public universities and colleges nationwide would use a single, free application form, similar to the application used by all California state schools. Students could choose not to apply, but the default would be for everyone to do so.
Obviously, every college can’t review every student’s application. So, students would submit a short list of top choices – say, one to five. Colleges would evaluate these applicants first. [This would prevent public universities from using acceptance rates to boost their prestige, but those metrics were never very helpful in assessing quality anyway.] Eventually, the system might even employ matching algorithms to find good fits between students and schools, as is now done with medical-residency programs.
The application process would go from being an opaque, complex, expensive process to a simple, universal piece of the high school experience. It would go a long way toward leveling the playing field between children of parents with low incomes and their wealthier peers. By doing so, it would make American society fairer, increase economic opportunity, and help discover some of the hidden talent that is currently going to waste.
Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.
