The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation has released a flashy report arguing in favor of admissions preferences for students from poor families. Supposedly, really good students who come from poor families are losing out because they seldom enroll in our elite colleges, but instead attend less prestigious ones.

The Pope Center will have much more to say about this in time, but I see two problems immediately.

First, the preferences for those (few) really good students will undoubtedly spread to include many who are of middling academic ability and then we will have the mismatch problem anew.

Second, there is no reason to equate top universities with great success while believing that such a student will be at a lifetime disadvantage by graduating from a “lesser” college. Often, those prestige schools are poor when it comes to faculty attention to undergrads, especially if those undergrads have some academic weaknesses.