AMERICA'S AFFORDABLE ELITE COLLEGES: WHICH SELECTIVE SCHOOLS GIVE HIGH-ACHIEVING, NON-WEALTHY STUDENTS A BREAK--AND WHICH BREAK THEIR BANK ACCOUNTS?

• Author: Edelman, Gilad

Compare the following two colleges: COLLEGE A COLLEGEB Acceptance rate 56% 39% 25th-75th percentile 590-680 610-690 SAT math score 25th-75th percentile SAT 650-730 580-660 critical reading score Median salary ten years $40,767 $57,188 after entering college College A, it turns out, is Sarah Lawrence, a liberal arts college located in the wealthy suburbs north of New York City. College B is Baruch College, part of the City University of New York system. Sarah Lawrence has all the trappings of an elite institution: national name recognition, beautiful brick buildings, and a long list of famous alumni, from J. J. Abrams to Barbara Walters. It's the kind of place people might think of when they imagine the quintessential college experience.

Baruch? Not so much. It has no traditional campus and sits in an unglamorous part of Midtown Manhattan. Nearly half of its students are the first in their family to go to college. If you're not from the New York area, you probably haven't heard of it at all. Even if you are, you might think of it as a perfectly fine public school, but not elite. And yet the two colleges are quite comparable academically.

Here's where they're not comparable at all: cost. The average student from a household making less than $75,000 a year will pay a net price of $24,682 per year to attend Sarah Lawrence. At Baruch, the same student will pay $4,128. (Almost all students at Baruch pay in-state tuition.)

If you're surprised to learn that a more prestigious and expensive college is arguably less selective than a public commuter school, don't feel too bad. (Selectivity includes acceptance rates, but also the academic qualifications of incoming students.) It's how we've been trained to think about higher education in this country. With thousands of colleges in the United States, and so many factors by which we could potentially judge them, we tend to fall back on vague indicia of prestige and name recognition. In other words, we--especially, but far from exclusively, people from well-to-do backgrounds--tend to think of "good schools" as the places where rich people send their kids. That goes a long way to explaining why so many people are capable of looking at a place like Baruch, a highly selective college that produces good outcomes for students for an incredibly low price--where, in fact, Pell Grant-eligible students (a shorthand for low-income) are an amazing 8 percent more likely to graduate than other students--and think it's somehow "worse" than Sarah Lawrence.

Selectivity is at the heart of most conversations about college quality. But, during the fifteen years that the Washington Monthly has published its college rankings, we have proudly paid very little attention to selectivity. Why? Because the media's obsession with simplistic and, in many cases, easily gamed measures of prestige has had deeply unfortunate consequences for American higher education by encouraging institutions to plow attention and resources into the things that matter to the U.S. News & World Report rankings--standardized test scores, faculty salary, expert opinion (that is, brand recognition)--instead of trying to help more students, especially disadvantaged ones, get a quality education.

That's not to say selectivity doesn't matter. It does. Research shows that going to a more selective school has a big impact on future earnings for students whose parents are poor or didn't go to college themselves. In fact, as damaging as our obsession with prestige can be, the real scandal of elite academia is the fact that a huge proportion of the most talented, qualified low-income students don't even apply to selective colleges--often because they don't think they can afford to go.

That's why, for the first time in five years, we've brought...