Today’s Inside Higher Ed features a piece on the continuing craze for egalitarianism in higher ed. Pointing to data that a disproportionately small percentage of students from low-income backgrounds are enrolling in highly selective colleges, people like Richard Kahlenberg claim that we suffer from “stratification” and insist that we’ve just got to have affirmative-action programs to achieve not just racial diversity, but also socioeconomic diversity.

The assumption behind all this is that going to one of those highly selective institutions means that the student gets a far better education, thus helping to bring about more “equity” in society. And that’s just not the case. Elite colleges don’t necessarily provide elite education. For the vast majority of students, the coursework at middling schools is indistinguishable from that at prestige schools. A few superstar students might find that they can go faster in STEM fields if they’re at an elite institution, but that has nothing to do with the income levels of their families. A Vietnamese student from a relatively poor family who happens to be a math whiz will be able to get where he needs to be without any socioeconomic affirmative action.

Conversely, giving mediocre students a supposed boost to put them into a more selective school is more often than not apt to cause them trouble, because they’ll mostly be competing with sharper students. It’s not at all clear that having a degree from a higher-ranked college is any advantage if you’re near the bottom of the class.

Egalitarians feel good when they get to shuffle people around based on the races or classes they supposedly represent, but I see no benefit to it.