LAST MONTH, USA Today reported that over half of us students here at the University come from families which earn an income of over $100,000 per year, while a full fifth of us exceed the $200,000 mark. Predictably, this revelation has touched off a wave of guilt and consternation here in our well-heeled yet tender-hearted community. It seems that despite the abundance of silver-spoon babies among us, we remain as eager as ever to indulge in a good story about the epic battle between the rich and the poor. Brave critics of the status quo routinely point to statistical disparities like this one as strongly indicative of the palpable injustice inherent in our educational system and in our society at large. This is just more evidence, they say, of unfair advantages being conferred on the privileged rich elite while the poor downtrodden masses continue to be, well, downtrodden. According to this view, our enrollment at the University makes us complicit in a system that works to maintain the dominance of the rich and powerful over the poor and disenfranchised.
It's a good thing, then, that this view is mostly a load of nonsense.
In a free and just society, it makes perfect sense that children who are more academically competitive happen to come from more financially successful families. This isn't because of some sinister conspiracy of the rich or preferential treatment that rich kids receive from admissions officers. Quite to the contrary, most top-notch schools actively seek to recruit students from poor areas, and admissions offices significantly favor low-income applicants in an effort to improve "socio-economic diversity." No, wealth is not the main cause of students' academic achievements and opportunities. Rather, student wealth and academic success are both caused in large part by a single factor: a family that puts a high value on hard work and education. To the degree that families instantiate these two values, they will have a proportionally higher likelihood of financial success, and their children will have an advantage in the realm of academic competition. As long as we live in a country that grants us the freedom to raise our own children and to choose how productively we want to live our own lives, this inequality is unavoidable.
Academic success, like wealth, is usually not something that families just happen to have by random luck. It is rather a condition that arises out of a background of sound decisions and actions, which people are largely free to choose for themselves. Thus, poorer children often face disadvantages in life not because of some systemic injustice, bourgeois oppression or other Marxist cliché, but rather because of the particular failings of their parents.
Yet even if you do lack a sound family background, opportunities for self-improvement abound. Contrary to the tired old dogma of rigid capitalist class structure, social mobility in the free market economy of the United States today is among the highest ever achieved by any society in the world. George Mason University economist Walter Williams recently published a column in which he pointed out that "85.8 percent of tax filers in the bottom fifth in 1979 had moved on to a higher quintile, and often to the top quintile, by 1988. Income mobility goes in the other direction as well. Of the people who were in the top 1 percent of income earners in 1979, over half, or 52.7 percent, were gone by 1988." These figures suggest that most people have a significant, if not always determinate, amount of control over the condition of their own lives. This amount of control is heightened enormously when it comes to the quality of their children's lives.
The bottom line is this: If you are a parent and your child can't get into a solid university, you probably have no one to blame but yourself. It isn't primarily a matter of how poor you start your adult life. Your child's success will depend chiefly on the values that you choose to teach and exemplify. You don't need fancy private schools or expensive SAT prep courses. If you don't read to your child at a young age, pay attention to his intellectual development and provide a loving environment for him to grow up in, don't blame the rich or the universities or the oppressive strictures of society for his miserable failure. It's your fault.
Anthony Dick's column appears Mondays inThe Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.
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