Evan Mandery has spent his life negotiating class boundaries. He attended elementary school in Brooklyn, where his father was a math teacher and principal. At 12, his family moved to a middle-class suburb on Long Island. Despite his middle-class upbringing, he crossed a class boundary with his parents’ support and attended Harvard Law. He earned a JD and after practicing law, he left the profession to teach at John Jay School of Criminal Justice, an HSI in the CUNY system.

Over his twenty plus years at John Jay, Mandery has met thousands of brilliant, hard-working individuals who face almost insurmountable odds in achieving their dreams. Further, he’s identified an unmistakable chasm separating his students’ lives and the fortunes of those with whom he’d attended Harvard. In his latest book, Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us (The New Press), Mandery writes, “The United States maintains an apartheid educational system” and “Elite colleges have received a pass for the central role they play” in that system. In Poison Ivy, Mandery brings America’s elite colleges to account.

Keeping the Affluent Rich   

For every poor student Harvard promotes to an affluent position, it helps ten wealthy students remain affluent. Elite colleges don’t exist to lift poor kids out of poverty but rather to protect affluence. “The story I’m trying to tell is that elite colleges are very minor players in terms of the amount of upward mobility they produce and that their core business is keeping rich kids rich. They are the exclusive promoters of a certain type of mobility, which is to jobs at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey,” says Mandery.

To bolster his case, Mandery created a statistic he calls stability rate. Rather than measuring students’ upward mobility, Mandery measured the product of the percentage of rich kids an institution admits and its success at keeping them rich. “(I define stability rate) as students remaining in the top quintile. Then I reanalyze the data to look at people who start at the top quintile and end up in the top one percent,” says Mandery.

Supporting the Doubly Disadvantaged

Affluent students walking the halls of America’s tony elite colleges enjoy a built-in support system, complete with safety nets. But the poor students who manage to beat the odds and attend elite colleges find no such support system. In fact, they’re doubly disadvantaged, a term coined by Anthony Abraham Jack, a leading scholar on race and class inequities.

The doubly disadvantaged enter elite schools directly from under-resourced, over-crowded, de facto segregated schools and struggle mightily in the toxic, classist environments these schools spawn. “When you look at the number of poor students of color who are at these schools, you’re looking at very small numbers” says Mandery. The number of low-income students “is below the critical mass that would allow them to connect with one another and offer mutual support,” he writes. Despite paltry numbers, low-income students seem to organize organically because their success depends on it. “They feel like outsiders and, in some cases, lack the social capital to navigate these spaces,” says Mandery. As a white, middle-class student at Harvard, Mandery felt out of place. “Imagine what it’s like if you’re going there as a poor black or brown student. You must feel like an alien,” he says.

If elite schools admitted more students of color – and hired more faculty of color - they too would have a built-in support system. They could do this by spending a small portion of their jaw-dropping endowments on low-income students rather than using their accumulated wealth to increase opportunities for existing students, a practice Mandery calls “very destructive.” Harvard’s endowment is about $53 billion, and Yale spends $150,000 per student per year. “In what universe do they need to keep spending that much money per student? John Jay spends $16,000 per year on its students,” says Mandery.

Testing and Rankings Traps

In 1926 the College Board administered the first SAT. Test makers had to lay traps for average test-takers to establish a variance between students and separate the cream from the milk. Soon enterprising individuals were teaching test-taking strategies to high schoolers to increase their SAT scores.

Today the SAT is used to make minute distinctions between individuals at the highest end of the spectrum and admits students whose high school averages suggest they lack the work ethic to succeed in college. “It’s letting in rich white kids who wouldn’t qualify on the basis of their high school average. That’s an egregious misuse of the instrument. I see this over and over again with the students I teach…I teach a lot of smart Hispanic students and Latinx students and when they want to go to law school, I see what they struggle with. It’s test-taking techniques,” says Mandery. His students or their parents can’t afford $300-per-hour SAT tutoring.

Like the SAT, college rankings skew to the rich. “Rankings are pernicious. The US News & World Report ranking is a proxy for wealth. Either the wealth of the institution or the wealth of the student body,” says Mandery. He calls social mobility metrics complete nonsense because they don’t reward schools for admitting high numbers of socio-economically disadvantaged students. “What it’s basically doing is looking at the difference in the graduation rate between the rich students you admit and the socio-economically disadvantaged students you admit. By that logic, I can let in one (socio-economically disadvantaged) student, and as long as he graduates, I excelled on that metric,” says Mandery. “It’s hard to find something that’s been more destructive to equity of access than those US News rankings. They’re horrible,” says Mandery.

Pathways for the Wealthy

Forty-three percent of the white students at Harvard are either a recruited athlete, a legacy, a child of a donor, or a child of a faculty member (ALDC). “In terms of admission rates, being an ALDC improves your chances by an order of magnitude. Harvard’s insistence on preserving these pathways did enormous damage to its position on affirmative action and, I would say, doomed affirmative action,” says Mandery. The Supreme Court ruled that diversity is a legitimate goal and schools using a race-conscious policy must ensure the policy is narrowly tailored. “If you can achieve it by race-neutral means, you’re supposed to do that as opposed to explicitly using race. Harvard could have done that. Harvard could have ended ALDC preferences,” says Mandery.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to getting more low-income students and students of color into America’s elite schools. “These colleges need to eliminate inequality in America to do significant good,” says Mandery. He’s optimistic, though. Elite colleges are populated by incredibly smart people, and if they put their minds and resources toward the problem, they can come up with creative ways to increase access. He’s disappointed, however, that no elite college has stated an explicit goal or established a threshold for socio-economic diversity. “They’re all committed to a vague goal of diversity which only means they are not explicitly racist or classist,” says Mandery. “They talk about diversity with such a level of vagueness, it has no meaning or policy implications.”