All things being unequal.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

Since the 1980s, I've been following, and occasionally contributing to, the national debate about whether America is becoming a more unequal society. For most of those years, the position of my friends on the right has been that the validity of studies showing growing inequality is highly questionable. As mounting evidence has made that position untenable, their main argument has shifted to: Who cares? Inequality isn't really a bad thing, they say, because in America, unlike the Old World, class isn't fixed. Today's elite is not the same as yesterday's or tomorrow's; inequality is the incentive system that makes our upwardly mobile society work.

But in recent years, a number of major studies have come out showing that America isn't as upwardly mobile as we thought. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, and even the UK have more movement between classes than we do. In general, Americans at the bottom aren't rising up, many in the middle are falling behind, and those at the top are not only doing better and better but also passing on their privileged positions to their kids. This explosion of our assumptions about upward mobility is the biggest undigested fact in American society right now.

The one tool that almost everyone would agree we have to combat these trends is education, especially post-secondary education. It turns out, however, that the higher education sector itself has become a vehicle for perpetuating inequality. In July, Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce published a study showing that while more blacks and Latinos are going to college, they are increasingly being channeled to the nation's 3,250 least-selective "open access" schools. Whites, on the other hand, are increasingly enrolling in the 468 most-selective colleges, which spend twice as much on instruction per pupil. White students went from being 9 percentage points overrepresented at these schools in 1995 to being 13 percentage points overrepresented in 2009. Lest you think this is pure meritocracy at work, consider this: 24 percent of whites with combined SAT scores above 1000 make it into those selective schools; for blacks and Hispanics, the figures are 17 percent and 18 percent respectively.

This is hugely significant because the chance of graduating from one of the open-access schools is slightly more than half of what it is at selective universities, and even those who do get degrees from open-access schools stand to earn substantially less...