Walter M. Kimbrough, president of Philander Smith College:
On April 11, the president of Columbia University announced that it had received a $400 million pledge from alumnus John W. Kluge, who in 2006 was 52nd on the Forbes list of the wealthiest people, earning his fortune through the buying and selling of television and radio stations. This gift, payable upon the 92-year-old’s death, will be the fourth largest ever given to a single institution of higher education.
With such a massive transfer of wealth, the accolades poured in, justifying such a gift to an Ivy League university. Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, said: “The essence of America’s greatness lies, in no small measure, in our collective commitment to giving all people the opportunity to improve their lives… [Kluge] has chosen to direct his amazing generosity to ensuring that young people will have the chance to benefit from a Columbia education regardless of their wealth or family income.” Mayor Michael Bloomberg indicated that investing in education produces returns that can’t be matched. Rep. Charles Rangel said the gift would ensure greater numbers of students can afford a first-class education.
Oh please!
I am becoming less and less tolerant of people who pass wealth on to the privileged and masquerade it as philanthropy. Philanthropy is the voluntary act of donating money, goods or services to a charitable cause, intended to promote good or improve human well being. When a billionaire gives money that will benefit people who are more than likely already well off or who already have access to huge sums of money, attending the ninth richest university by endowment, this is not philanthropy. This simply extends the gross inequities that exist in our country — inequities that one day will come home to roost.
Exactly. As Kimbrough goes on to note, low-income students are a tiny minority at Columbia. Columbia is not atypical in this regard. Even when places like Harvard and Yale offer free education to students from low-income families, such students are still an endangered species at those schools. Given the stats, we might take the cynical route and doubt the schools’ commitment to attracting students from non-wealthy parts of society. The admissions process at these schools is, after all, hardly a process known for either fairness or transparency. But I don’t mean to take the cynical route. I suspect that there is some degree of sincere commitment on the part of school administrators to attracting more lower income students. In fact, I suspect that they were disappointed when their financial aid initiatives failed to bear much fruit.
But the point is that, for whatever reason, these schools educate mostly privileged students. So I think Kimbrough is right to question the praiseworthiness of wealthy people giving huge sums of money to already wealthy institutions for the education of privileged students. (Though perhaps it would be better not to call into question whether this is philanthropy — it seems to me that much of what standardly gets called philanthropy primarily benefits the already privileged. So perhaps it would be best to just concede that term.) Just think about how much more that same $400 million would accomplish were it, say, split up between 400 colleges that have endowments that are under a million dollars.
Kimbrough’s complete piece can be found here. If you find mostly idiotic drivel entertaining, you can also read the responses to his post there.
Oh, and it’s not just Columbia that is currently benefitting from these sorts of enormous gifts. Cornell just got its largest gift from an individual donor: $300 million from Joan and Sanford I. Weill.
Sydney
Alan Schmierer
http://www.cnn.com/2007/EDUCATION/05/31/uofc.donation.ap/index.html
How do you feel about this donation to University of Chicago?
I like it a lot more. There is, however, still an issue of concentrating enormous amounts of wealth in a handful of elite schools. It is perhaps worth noting that with this gift the University of Chicago is freed from paying for these scholarships from its general coffers (as a number of other top schools do).
Do you think that significantly more low-income students will apply to the University of Chicago as a result of these scholarships? Or will a lot of these students still think that Chicago is not for them?
I think it is an interesting question of why financial aid incentives make so little of a difference at some of the elite schools. Harvard, for example, already has a programme in place to pay all the costs of attending for students from families with an income below $60,000, but it only has about half as many students from that income bracket as the University of Chicago (data can be seen at http://www.economicdiversity.org for Harvard and Chicago).
Why is that? Because low-income students have a perception of Harvard as the school for rich Northeastern prep-school kids and hence don’t bother to apply?
Sydney
There are a variety of possibilities:
1) Low-income students perceive Harvard as for prep-school kids & don’t apply (think they can’t get in)
2) Low-income students perceive Harvard as for prep-school kids & don’t apply (don’t want to hang out w/that crowd/Harvard has reputation as no fun, etc.)
3) Low-income students live in poor neighborhoods with underfunded schools and have difficulty maintaining grades for Ivy League acceptance
4) Low-income students tend to come from urban environments and attend schools near home (I have no idea about the low-income populations in Chicago vs. Boston, but U Chicago is certainly in a more “urban” neighborhood than Cambridge)
5) Harvard is [implicitly or explicitly] prejudiced against low-income students (less admissions visits to certain school districts, etc.) than U Chicago
etc. etc. etc.
I think we’d need to look at a bigger sample of schools that differ across several variables to be able to tease out the lower financial aid populations of one school vs. another.
-L
The article doesn’t mention another aspect of the U.Chi program that I think is worth noting — the $100 million doesn’t just go toward scholarships, its to fund the Odyssey program, which includes an extensive outreach effort to minority/low-income/atypical students.
University of Iowa does something like this for the law school. The legal field is full of rich white men (go figure) and to attract diversity, we have an outreach program that invites minority students of all types (not just race) to visit the law school and participate in a short (free) program that would hopefully encourage them to consider law. The assumption is, of course, that they don’t have any role models who are lawyers and therefore never picture becoming lawyers.
Anyway, I think the Odyssey program might be on the right track, and I agree with your points. You can’t just make the money available and expect that low-income students will just jump on board and start applying (at $60-80 per application, if they don’t realize the fee could be waived).
On one last note… I used to work at the study abroad office and we tried using the same recruiting techniques to get minority students. Most assume they can’t afford to study abroad, but Illinois has worked really hard to offer a surprising number of programs at the same price as standard tuition. The trick is getting the students to apply. I spent a lot of time giving 2 min talks before African-American Studies classes. I’m really not convinced that I made any progress.
In response to Lisa:
I very much doubt that we’ll arrive at definite answers to my questions with a weblog discussion! Still, it’s interesting to see what the possible explanations might be.
I used to think that the fact that so few low-income students applied to places like Harvard could be attributed in good part to reasons like your (3), i.e., low-income students don’t have adequate preparation to be accepted into elite schools.
But seeing that Chicago has far more low-income students made me wonder if I was right in thinking that (3) is the primary explanation. I don’t know what percentage of applicants at Chicago get accepted, but it is also a pretty selective school. So I was wondering if reasons like your (1) perhaps accounted for more of what is going on. And then maybe this perception applies more to schools like Harvard than to schools like Chicago.
Of course, people may also just think, sometimes erroneously, that Ivy League schools are prohibitively expensive and therefore out of reach for them. That erroneous conception is part of the reason that I didn’t apply to Yale earlier. Then eventually I discovered that going to Yale was actually much cheaper for me than going to the Canadian university I was going to, even though its sticker price of $6000/year tuition was far cheaper than Yale’s sticker price.
As for having a larger sample, Yale and Stanford also have similar financial aid packages to Harvard (though the cutoff is $45k instead of $60k). Stanford’s is too recent, though, for it to affect the data at http://www.economicdiversity.org. As for Yale, New Haven is a much smaller city than Chicago, but, still, there are obviously ample numbers of low-income urban students in New Haven. The percentage of Yale students that are from under $60k families was 15% in 2004/05, as compared to Harvard’s 14% and Chicago’s 26%. Columbia, of course, is in a large urban area and it had 17%, much lower than Chicago’s.
Sydney
I remember when I was in high school, it was kind of embarrassing to talk about Yale–major stigma of snobbishness, expense, etc. I thought it sounded like a great small school with small classes like I got in high school, but that’s not what was driving the public perception of the school. So even if you get the individual student to be interested in your school, they may be disinclined to deal with the flack they might get from those around them. That throws a bit of a wrench in your attempts to educate the students about your school; there needs to be a much wider persuasion of the community.
Erin
I don’t know much about Columbia’s location, but I was thinking about Sydney’s comment that they are both urban locations. University of Chicago is a beautiful campus, but it is situated near some very poor communities — Cicero, East Chicago, Summit, etc. I wonder if the proximity makes U. Chicago seem more attainable… or maybe it comes down to Lisa’s #5 and Chicago recruits from these local schools more? I’d be interested in seeing where their low income students are coming from, because their numbers seem impressive compared to Ivy League schools.
Also, Erin, while there was undoubtedly a lot of stigma about expense, most of the students were buzzing about whether there was a potential genius in our midst (based on whether or not you were accepted), not that the school was snobby (though I would imagine some adults probably said that).