Ross has written a truly terrific column on the sources of conservative skepticism towards elite institutions. As you know, a number of critics have suggested that the predominantly white Tea Party movement is motivated by racism, a view I find entirely bankrupt. Yet Ross suggests that there is an undercurrent of racial anxiety, which derives from the sense that the values of rural and small-town white Americans are being undermined by an elite that is hostile to those values. And to the extent that this elite is reflected in and manufactured by elite educational institution, Ross suggests that this anxiety has some basis in reality:

Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-lengthstudy of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

Ross continues:

Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”
This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions.

My friend Ben McKean, a graduate student at an elite university, then observed that Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania and a well-regarded left-liberal political theorist, has raised similar concerns. Gutmann scrupulously avoids referring to white students per se, yet her observations parallel Ross’s in some respects:

Diversity is not an educational end-in-itself. But when accompanied by convincing academic qualifications, socioeconomic diversity (like racial, religious, and ethnic diversity) serves as a means to three extremely important ends of higher education: first, equalizing opportunity; second, educating leaders for all sectors of society; and third, enriching the educational experience of all students on campus.
To the extent that we are truly committed to the three important ends of higher education that can be served by socioeconomic diversity, we need to push for more progress in recruiting highly qualified students not only from low-income but also from middle-income families, who are the most underrepresented on our campuses when academic qualifications are taken into account.

She follows with number on middle-income underrepresentation:

The greatest underrepresentation by far on our campuses is not in either of the two lowest-income groups but in the middle-income group. Since these data have been analyzed, this headline–the even bigger Middle Income Squeeze–has not gained as much attention as it deserves. Let me share these data with you. The lowest income quintile among American college-bound families accounts for 7.5 percent of all highly qualified seniors, and these students are underrepresented on selective private university campuses by .6 percent. The second lowest income quintile accounts for 10.9 percent of highly qualified seniors; and these students are underrepresented on our campuses by 3.7 percent. Together, these students represent American college-bound families earning under about $41,000, and they are underrepresented by 4.3 percent.
Now consider the middle 20 percent of graduating seniors by income, who come from families earning about $41,000 to $61,000. The middle-income quintile accounts for fully 20.3 percent of all highly qualified high school graduates, but they account for only 11.9 percent of our undergraduate enrollment. They are underrepresented by 8.4 percent, almost twice the under-representation of the two lowest quintiles combined.
Students in the second highest income group, from families with incomes between about $62,000 and $94,000, constitute 25.5 percent of highly qualified students, and our campuses enroll 17.1 percent of this group. They are squeezed by the same 8.4 percent margin as the middle-income group.

Ross acknowledges a potential objection, namely that expanding the meritocratic elite might further undermine the autonomy of local communities.

The more salient question in my view is whether the cultural power of these institutions will eventually erode. One can see why Amy Gutmann would want to reform the University of Pennsylvania, yet it’s not clear that society should be investing more in Penn and other elite institutions rather than encouraging the creation of new non-traditional institutions that can better meet the needs of a changing economy and society. This is one reason why I’m so enthusiastic about Anya Kamenetz’s DIY U vision for the future of higher education.

Paul Krugman had a smart take on the future of elite universities in the late 1990s:

Or consider the panic over “downsizing” that gripped America in 1996. As economists quickly pointed out, the rate at which Americans were losing jobs in the 90s was not especially high by historical standards. Why, then, did downsizing suddenly become news? Because for the first time white-collar, college-educated workers were being fired in large numbers, even while skilled machinists and other blue-collar workers were in high demand. This should have been a clear signal that the days of ever-rising wage premia for people with higher education were over, but somehow nobody noticed.
Eventually, of course, the eroding payoff to higher education created a crisis in the education industry itself. Why should a student put herself through four years of college and several years of postgraduate work in order to acquire academic credentials with hardly any monetary value? These days jobs that require only six or twelve months of vocational training — paranursing, carpentry, household maintenance (a profession that has taken over much of the housework that used to be done by unpaid spouses), and so on — pay nearly as much as one can expect to earn with a master’s degree, and more than one can expect to earn with a Ph.D.. And so enrollment in colleges and universities has dropped almost two-thirds since its turn-of-the-century peak. Many institutions of higher education could not survive this harsher environment. The famous universities mostly did manage to cope, but only by changing their character and reverting to an older role. Today a place like Harvard is, as it was in the 19th century, more of a social institution than a scholarly one — a place for the children of the wealthy to refine their social graces and make friends with others of the same class.

Of course, we haven’t seen this pattern emerge yet — in the current downturn, postgraduate education remains a valuable asset. My sense, however, is that Krugman was right about the longer-term trajectory, particularly if we continue to see progress in machine intelligence.