> but there’s every reason to believe that a scandalous amount of the affirmative action slots at elite colleges are going to wealthy international students from Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria
Excellent post, top to bottom. The endless focus on either legacy or "anti-White/anti-Asian" admissions at a vanishingly small number of schools with highly competitive admissions processes, at the expense of the overwhelming percentage of college-bound students and the finances that go into them... it's like watching the Great Fire of Chicago and worrying about a cigarette lighter. But like you say, the media only cares about the top schools, and commentators only care about facile examples they can use to back up their politics.*
Higher education is full of misaligned incentives the whole way through and as long as they are aligned with financial goals that will continue to be the case. The top schools will go for the student who matches a donor profile. All other schools will stack students to the rafters for the immediate tuition check.
*And here's mine: public universities in this country should be much more selective and much cheaper, and states should reallocate a lot of funding for these schools to either vocational schools or something else entirely. Education as a training ground for an enlightened citizenry is passé; if college is to be economic and vocational then let the resource allocation match the goal.
This is one of those instances when it is CRUCIAL to differentiate Black from African. Data on Black Americans actually UNDERSTATES their level of social and economic marginalization because it groups actual Black Americans (I.E. descendents of pre-Civil Rights Act Americans) and African Americans (individuals who immigrated from Africa post CRA) when African Americans are economically doing pretty damn well in the US.
I find it hard to care about debates concerning "fair" criteria for who gets a limited number of comfy upper-middle class spots. I don't really put a lot of thought into who should get go to Harvard or who should get to be CFO of a fortune 500. Should it be only quantifiable talent? Should we have affirmative action to make up for historical injustices or implicit bias? I dunno. Does it matter to 99% of the population? Probably not
As Matt Yglesias put it: meritocracy is bad. I'd rather improve the bottom than squabble over the criteria of the top.
"... debt burden is skewed towards the marginal students who lack the human capital to then pay back that debt...".
Hate the term "human capital", like fingernails on blackboard hate (are there blackboards any more?).
Labor and capital are opposed. The poor souls that go into college debt end up laboring to pay that back (sometimes forever). They have as virtually no capital of which to speak.
Off the soapbox, great post. I'll go have a cup of coffee.
Since most people won't read it, here's the key quote.
"Let’s say for example I have a process for hiring that was super transparent and also has no correlation with future performance. I show people the process’s internal logic: turns out, I’m just randomly sorting the list of N candidates and picking the first M candidates in that list.
Now let’s say I implement another process for choosing candidates. It’s just me making decisions based on my gut. Turns out, my gut is also no better than average and my gut choices have no correlation with future performance either.
[...] Despite that, if I implement the latter process nobody at my company would bat an eye, and if I implemented the former process I’d get fired on the spot for being not serious."
In short, I think people overrate the value of their discretion.
The pressures on K-12 education seem to often run directly counter to the situations faced by universities.
In one of my multiple brushes with higher ed I tutored college students in an introductory alegbra class. It was a gatekeeping class in that majors required it which probably didn't need to require it and some students had to take it 3 times. What I noticed from those students was that the math disconnect often started in 3rd grade. Memorizing the multiplication tables. Without having the multiplication facts, division got stumbly. Without division, fractions got very slow. Least common multiple and greatest common factor were knee deep in the sand and then quadratic equations, graphing and algebra were impossible.
The usual US education strategy of "pass them with a C" creates this. Because C means they didn't understand 25% of it and for subjects that are very cumulative, building on prior knowledge, that 25% builds up fast.
I think math remediation still lives in special ed-IEP land, though. Which means a different funding stream and lots of evals and testing, which the child must do poorly on in order to qualify. A student with C/D grades in math with no "disabilities" may not be eligible for school-based math help.
Some tutoring programs are trying to change this, which is good.
But before a student gets to college and discovers they can't do enough algebra to get their EMT certificate or something, even an English teaching degree, there has been a lot of buck-passing in the K-12.
Good lord, this is like an index to my writing over the past ten years. I agree with almost everything said, although I'd quibble here:
"which is apparently undesirable for social reasons and for fear that these Asian students represent stiff academic competition"
It is *definitely* undesirable for social reasons, and there's not much fear that the Asian students represent academic competition. Asian education culture is extremely unattractive to Americans (of all races) and as you say, colleges want rich whites to donate. They're fine with rich Asians donating, far less fine with admitting hundreds of recent Asian immigrants with unwealthy parents who spent 8 years prepping for the SAT while simultaneously in three years of prep for the SHSAT. I wrote about white flight from high school test-based admissions schools. Many others have noticed that all the schools that ended testing have or will become much more white. Far less mentioned is that whites aren't *interested* in the schools. This is most clearly observable in NYC, as they show the testing rates. Whites and Asians have very similar admissions rates and represent the same percentage of the NYC public school population, but Asians test at twice the rate of whites (and it's a safe bet that a good chunk of the whites are immigrants.) So while people bewail the change as cynical, it is to me a fair question why any community should spend a lot of money on a test-based school that is primarily used by immigrants. The next question is why bother having test-based schools at all, of course. Article: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2021/08/01/white-flight-from-admissions-test-high-schools/
While I'm a fan of tests, I've stopped believing in the granular scores. Kind of like IQ. The difference between a 600 and 800 SAT math score is irrelevant until you tell me how much each one prepped. But the difference between a 400 and a 600--even a 500 and a 600--is much more relevant. In much the same way that the difference between a 115 and 130 IQ isn't something I'd bank on, but 90 and 115 is relevant. Asian test prep did much to kill my faith in high scores as an absolute indicator. https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2021/09/18/false-positives/
One of the undercovered aspects of the college fraud story was the College Board couldn't promise the reliability of its test scores. Proctors were bribed to complete the test. Moreover, the College Board doesn't like spending money creating a separate international test, so it just reuses old American ones--that information gets out very quickly the day of the test, and the international prep companies have provided their kids with all the old copies of the test to memorize. So the day of the test, the info on which test is sent out to millions of testers, who just regurgitate the answers they memorized for that test. (Or they are just sent the answers to copy down if they pay extra for a jijing). Wrote about this here https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2014/12/31/the-sat-is-corrupt-no-one-wants-to-know/ and here https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/the-sat-is-corrupt-reuters-version/
I found this appalling, because the College Board and other academic tests were about the only ones that were left to be somewhat secure. Microsoft and other tech companies pay a fortune to kind of sort of protect the integrity of their certification tests. Whenever someone says we should end college and just use certification or credential tests, I laugh. Reliable tests cost a fortune to produce. To make tests really safe, you'd have to be sure that no questions got out, no format got out, and everyone taking the test was only interested in the certification. And even then, you'd have to isolate the testers for 24 hours after the test so they couldn't brain dump.
While the failure rate of students who take on huge loans is a tragedy, at least those people are doing it by choice. Far worse societally is the fact the college degree is becoming ruined as any sort of academic marker. Freddie mentioned remediation--but colleges are doing away with remediation. the entire state university systems in California and Tennessee had done away with them several years ago, but the push to abolish the SAT will make that even more prevalent. I wrote about it here: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2017/04/15/corrupted-college/
This is hands down the largest issue. Its's getting worse, too. We need far fewer colleges.
The fixes are all impossible and would fail disparate impact tests:
1. Use federal oversight to stop all colleges from accepting unqualified candidates. Congress should set a minimum demonstrated ability level federally guaranteed loans--say, an ACT section score of 23, an SAT score of 550 (or even 500). Pell grants, too, should have a minimum. If you don't think this will make a difference, you are unaware of the depths of illiterate that colleges are stooping to.
2. The big fix that might work is at the state level. I would love to see some red states require a minimum ACT/SAT score and get past the lawsuit. If things get as bad as I fear, college degrees are going to become worthless, and a graduation from a school with a baseline score will start to be one of the only indicators of ability.
3. Stop preventing high schools from teaching remedial classes. We get a kid reading at 3rd grade level, we still have to put in in a standard 9th grade class reading Romeo and Juliet. Ditto math. In fact, we should dramatically expand the high school options to be less college bound and more fun.
Well, this is enough. In fact, maybe I should just turn it into a blog post, given my writer's block!
"If you want to put an end to preference for rich kids, overthrow capitalism. That’s really your only option."
I think you are too quick to dismiss the possibility of social pressure leading to legacy reform. Harvard is a corporation, but that corporation is in the business of managing a precious brand. I could envision a scenario where a large activist movement actually started to harm that brand's reputation - e.g. leftists pressuring their office *not* to hire from schools that have those super racist legacy admissions, more social stigma towards your classmates who choose to attend a school that does.
And I actually think Harvard would be the elite school in the best spot to take advantage of the no-more-legacies world since they have tons of money, so I could see it making a calculated decision here and being the first mover. If Harvard drops legacy admissions but Yale still has them, there's a now social stigma towards picking Yale over Harvard until Yale also drops them, etc. etc. I am not betting this will happen next year, but I don't think it's a ridiculous narrative if the subject picks up steam with activists.
So I think the real question is why the legion of activists *at* these schools haven't taken a greater interest in making this subject a primary goal for campus activism. I think you can probably come up with some pretty cynical reasons why they've chosen to prioritize renaming buildings instead of betraying their roommates and future employers.
HI Freddie, funny that you should mention Goldman. So back in 2013 , LLoyd Blankfein announced his support for gay marriage. I am gay and cynical and was suspicious of motivation.
Note that in 2013, supporting gay marriage was the most expedient way to score mega-suck points with the cultural left.
And I realized that his cultural liberalism aside, supporting gay marriage was one of the many ways that Goldman Sachs polished its public persona in its fight against the kinds of regulations that could have come to pass had Occupy Wall Street and Elizabeth Warren triumphed. Regulations, mind you, that really would have crippled banks' business models and their executive's compensation.
In comparison, Diversity/Equity/Inclusion is like a sloppy bj to business models....requiring basically no change in them and providing great PR. This is why it's everywhere in the corporate world. Low cost mega insurance.
For a certain kind of person, who is overrepresented in the chattering class, the SAT is a test you can only fail. It’s so right-censored you can’t distinguish yourself — if you get a 1600, who cares, that’s just what you were supposed to do. But at the same, if your score is even a little low it’s a shameful disaster. This obviously produces resentment.
I wonder if this isn’t a factor in the “get rid of SAT” discourse. Maybe a lot of people involved just personally resent their experience with the test.
"Most schools are totally tuition-dependent, and thus enrollment-dependent. But the elite few with huge endowments get rich through parent/alumni donations and the interest that they accrue from same. They’re not going to stop finding ways to attract rich kids with rich parents who will swell their coffers."
My question here is - is this solely driven by parents who have a kid that they'd like to be a 'legacy admission' some day, or do people do this just because they ... uh... have warm feelings towards their alma mater or something?
The first explanation seems undercut about the proportion of legacy admissions being quite small and insignificant, but the second implies huge numbers of people who would use some of their hard-earned charitable donations budget on a rich institution that they don't get anything out of. I literally don't know how somebody's mind might work that this seems like a good idea.
I'm probably missing something but I'll ask anyway. I'm having trouble squaring the following: "a Black B-student with a handful of extracurriculars from an average American public high school will be able to get into a vast number of institutions generally and likely into several competitive institutions as well" with "American-born descendants of African slaves fill a scandalously low number of affirmative action seats".
Do you mean "...a scandalously low number *at Harvard*" or comparable institutions? I otherwise don't know what affirmative actions seats would be for if black B-students are getting into most colleges anyway.
Thank you for linking to the article on 4-year colleges opposing free community college. They absolutely want those students for themselves—and I am sure that the colleges lobbying against it include nonprofit 4years that pretend to have a big social justice mission.
Some private colleges are even starting their own 2-year programs, acting like it’s this noble service to the poor when really they’re hurting the local community college by competing with them. They’ve figured out that they can run low-cost programs and generate revenue from the students’ financial aid.
Non-selective schools just want students who can pay at all. Even if it just means filling out financial aid forms successfully (a sticking point for more than you’d think…) and passing enough classes to remain eligible for future financial aid.
Not to fixate on Harvard but... Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel proposes that elite colleges (i.e. Harvard) experiment with admitting half the class by lottery and then compare how those students perform compared to the other half of students admitted on the basis of so-called "merit." (The lottery would be after an initial weeding out of blatantly unqualified applicants).
> but there’s every reason to believe that a scandalous amount of the affirmative action slots at elite colleges are going to wealthy international students from Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria
I don't think that's true, colleges are not supposed to include international students in their racial demographics, e.g. https://oir.harvard.edu/files/huoir/files/harvard_cds_2019-2020.pdf
Excellent post, top to bottom. The endless focus on either legacy or "anti-White/anti-Asian" admissions at a vanishingly small number of schools with highly competitive admissions processes, at the expense of the overwhelming percentage of college-bound students and the finances that go into them... it's like watching the Great Fire of Chicago and worrying about a cigarette lighter. But like you say, the media only cares about the top schools, and commentators only care about facile examples they can use to back up their politics.*
Higher education is full of misaligned incentives the whole way through and as long as they are aligned with financial goals that will continue to be the case. The top schools will go for the student who matches a donor profile. All other schools will stack students to the rafters for the immediate tuition check.
*And here's mine: public universities in this country should be much more selective and much cheaper, and states should reallocate a lot of funding for these schools to either vocational schools or something else entirely. Education as a training ground for an enlightened citizenry is passé; if college is to be economic and vocational then let the resource allocation match the goal.
This is one of those instances when it is CRUCIAL to differentiate Black from African. Data on Black Americans actually UNDERSTATES their level of social and economic marginalization because it groups actual Black Americans (I.E. descendents of pre-Civil Rights Act Americans) and African Americans (individuals who immigrated from Africa post CRA) when African Americans are economically doing pretty damn well in the US.
I find it hard to care about debates concerning "fair" criteria for who gets a limited number of comfy upper-middle class spots. I don't really put a lot of thought into who should get go to Harvard or who should get to be CFO of a fortune 500. Should it be only quantifiable talent? Should we have affirmative action to make up for historical injustices or implicit bias? I dunno. Does it matter to 99% of the population? Probably not
As Matt Yglesias put it: meritocracy is bad. I'd rather improve the bottom than squabble over the criteria of the top.
Excellent, excellent post. Minor, minor quibble:
"... debt burden is skewed towards the marginal students who lack the human capital to then pay back that debt...".
Hate the term "human capital", like fingernails on blackboard hate (are there blackboards any more?).
Labor and capital are opposed. The poor souls that go into college debt end up laboring to pay that back (sometimes forever). They have as virtually no capital of which to speak.
Off the soapbox, great post. I'll go have a cup of coffee.
The part about SAT/ACT vs GPA/wholistic criteria reminds me about a different blogpost. This one is about interviewing rather than college admissions: https://ryxcommar.com/2020/10/19/on-being-an-interviewer/
Since most people won't read it, here's the key quote.
"Let’s say for example I have a process for hiring that was super transparent and also has no correlation with future performance. I show people the process’s internal logic: turns out, I’m just randomly sorting the list of N candidates and picking the first M candidates in that list.
Now let’s say I implement another process for choosing candidates. It’s just me making decisions based on my gut. Turns out, my gut is also no better than average and my gut choices have no correlation with future performance either.
[...] Despite that, if I implement the latter process nobody at my company would bat an eye, and if I implemented the former process I’d get fired on the spot for being not serious."
In short, I think people overrate the value of their discretion.
The pressures on K-12 education seem to often run directly counter to the situations faced by universities.
In one of my multiple brushes with higher ed I tutored college students in an introductory alegbra class. It was a gatekeeping class in that majors required it which probably didn't need to require it and some students had to take it 3 times. What I noticed from those students was that the math disconnect often started in 3rd grade. Memorizing the multiplication tables. Without having the multiplication facts, division got stumbly. Without division, fractions got very slow. Least common multiple and greatest common factor were knee deep in the sand and then quadratic equations, graphing and algebra were impossible.
The usual US education strategy of "pass them with a C" creates this. Because C means they didn't understand 25% of it and for subjects that are very cumulative, building on prior knowledge, that 25% builds up fast.
I think math remediation still lives in special ed-IEP land, though. Which means a different funding stream and lots of evals and testing, which the child must do poorly on in order to qualify. A student with C/D grades in math with no "disabilities" may not be eligible for school-based math help.
Some tutoring programs are trying to change this, which is good.
But before a student gets to college and discovers they can't do enough algebra to get their EMT certificate or something, even an English teaching degree, there has been a lot of buck-passing in the K-12.
Good lord, this is like an index to my writing over the past ten years. I agree with almost everything said, although I'd quibble here:
"which is apparently undesirable for social reasons and for fear that these Asian students represent stiff academic competition"
It is *definitely* undesirable for social reasons, and there's not much fear that the Asian students represent academic competition. Asian education culture is extremely unattractive to Americans (of all races) and as you say, colleges want rich whites to donate. They're fine with rich Asians donating, far less fine with admitting hundreds of recent Asian immigrants with unwealthy parents who spent 8 years prepping for the SAT while simultaneously in three years of prep for the SHSAT. I wrote about white flight from high school test-based admissions schools. Many others have noticed that all the schools that ended testing have or will become much more white. Far less mentioned is that whites aren't *interested* in the schools. This is most clearly observable in NYC, as they show the testing rates. Whites and Asians have very similar admissions rates and represent the same percentage of the NYC public school population, but Asians test at twice the rate of whites (and it's a safe bet that a good chunk of the whites are immigrants.) So while people bewail the change as cynical, it is to me a fair question why any community should spend a lot of money on a test-based school that is primarily used by immigrants. The next question is why bother having test-based schools at all, of course. Article: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2021/08/01/white-flight-from-admissions-test-high-schools/
While I'm a fan of tests, I've stopped believing in the granular scores. Kind of like IQ. The difference between a 600 and 800 SAT math score is irrelevant until you tell me how much each one prepped. But the difference between a 400 and a 600--even a 500 and a 600--is much more relevant. In much the same way that the difference between a 115 and 130 IQ isn't something I'd bank on, but 90 and 115 is relevant. Asian test prep did much to kill my faith in high scores as an absolute indicator. https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2021/09/18/false-positives/
One of the undercovered aspects of the college fraud story was the College Board couldn't promise the reliability of its test scores. Proctors were bribed to complete the test. Moreover, the College Board doesn't like spending money creating a separate international test, so it just reuses old American ones--that information gets out very quickly the day of the test, and the international prep companies have provided their kids with all the old copies of the test to memorize. So the day of the test, the info on which test is sent out to millions of testers, who just regurgitate the answers they memorized for that test. (Or they are just sent the answers to copy down if they pay extra for a jijing). Wrote about this here https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2014/12/31/the-sat-is-corrupt-no-one-wants-to-know/ and here https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/the-sat-is-corrupt-reuters-version/
I found this appalling, because the College Board and other academic tests were about the only ones that were left to be somewhat secure. Microsoft and other tech companies pay a fortune to kind of sort of protect the integrity of their certification tests. Whenever someone says we should end college and just use certification or credential tests, I laugh. Reliable tests cost a fortune to produce. To make tests really safe, you'd have to be sure that no questions got out, no format got out, and everyone taking the test was only interested in the certification. And even then, you'd have to isolate the testers for 24 hours after the test so they couldn't brain dump.
While the failure rate of students who take on huge loans is a tragedy, at least those people are doing it by choice. Far worse societally is the fact the college degree is becoming ruined as any sort of academic marker. Freddie mentioned remediation--but colleges are doing away with remediation. the entire state university systems in California and Tennessee had done away with them several years ago, but the push to abolish the SAT will make that even more prevalent. I wrote about it here: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2017/04/15/corrupted-college/
This is hands down the largest issue. Its's getting worse, too. We need far fewer colleges.
The fixes are all impossible and would fail disparate impact tests:
1. Use federal oversight to stop all colleges from accepting unqualified candidates. Congress should set a minimum demonstrated ability level federally guaranteed loans--say, an ACT section score of 23, an SAT score of 550 (or even 500). Pell grants, too, should have a minimum. If you don't think this will make a difference, you are unaware of the depths of illiterate that colleges are stooping to.
If we could couple it with federally financed vocational centers that are NOT about sexy skills, but boring stuff like learning to be a short order cook or nurse's aide, or dental hygeniests, and then give loans to that, it might pass muster. I'm skeptical,though. Wrote about vocational ideas here: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/vocational-ed-advancing-the-debate/(by the way, people always overrate our history of vocational ed. We've never had a golden age: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/vocational-ed-and-the-elephant/)
2. The big fix that might work is at the state level. I would love to see some red states require a minimum ACT/SAT score and get past the lawsuit. If things get as bad as I fear, college degrees are going to become worthless, and a graduation from a school with a baseline score will start to be one of the only indicators of ability.
3. Stop preventing high schools from teaching remedial classes. We get a kid reading at 3rd grade level, we still have to put in in a standard 9th grade class reading Romeo and Juliet. Ditto math. In fact, we should dramatically expand the high school options to be less college bound and more fun.
Well, this is enough. In fact, maybe I should just turn it into a blog post, given my writer's block!
"If you want to put an end to preference for rich kids, overthrow capitalism. That’s really your only option."
I think you are too quick to dismiss the possibility of social pressure leading to legacy reform. Harvard is a corporation, but that corporation is in the business of managing a precious brand. I could envision a scenario where a large activist movement actually started to harm that brand's reputation - e.g. leftists pressuring their office *not* to hire from schools that have those super racist legacy admissions, more social stigma towards your classmates who choose to attend a school that does.
And I actually think Harvard would be the elite school in the best spot to take advantage of the no-more-legacies world since they have tons of money, so I could see it making a calculated decision here and being the first mover. If Harvard drops legacy admissions but Yale still has them, there's a now social stigma towards picking Yale over Harvard until Yale also drops them, etc. etc. I am not betting this will happen next year, but I don't think it's a ridiculous narrative if the subject picks up steam with activists.
So I think the real question is why the legion of activists *at* these schools haven't taken a greater interest in making this subject a primary goal for campus activism. I think you can probably come up with some pretty cynical reasons why they've chosen to prioritize renaming buildings instead of betraying their roommates and future employers.
HI Freddie, funny that you should mention Goldman. So back in 2013 , LLoyd Blankfein announced his support for gay marriage. I am gay and cynical and was suspicious of motivation.
Note that in 2013, supporting gay marriage was the most expedient way to score mega-suck points with the cultural left.
And I realized that his cultural liberalism aside, supporting gay marriage was one of the many ways that Goldman Sachs polished its public persona in its fight against the kinds of regulations that could have come to pass had Occupy Wall Street and Elizabeth Warren triumphed. Regulations, mind you, that really would have crippled banks' business models and their executive's compensation.
In comparison, Diversity/Equity/Inclusion is like a sloppy bj to business models....requiring basically no change in them and providing great PR. This is why it's everywhere in the corporate world. Low cost mega insurance.
For a certain kind of person, who is overrepresented in the chattering class, the SAT is a test you can only fail. It’s so right-censored you can’t distinguish yourself — if you get a 1600, who cares, that’s just what you were supposed to do. But at the same, if your score is even a little low it’s a shameful disaster. This obviously produces resentment.
I wonder if this isn’t a factor in the “get rid of SAT” discourse. Maybe a lot of people involved just personally resent their experience with the test.
"Most schools are totally tuition-dependent, and thus enrollment-dependent. But the elite few with huge endowments get rich through parent/alumni donations and the interest that they accrue from same. They’re not going to stop finding ways to attract rich kids with rich parents who will swell their coffers."
My question here is - is this solely driven by parents who have a kid that they'd like to be a 'legacy admission' some day, or do people do this just because they ... uh... have warm feelings towards their alma mater or something?
The first explanation seems undercut about the proportion of legacy admissions being quite small and insignificant, but the second implies huge numbers of people who would use some of their hard-earned charitable donations budget on a rich institution that they don't get anything out of. I literally don't know how somebody's mind might work that this seems like a good idea.
“If you want to put an end to preference for rich kids, overthrow capitalism”
Then, at least in most communist countries to date, you will have a preference for the kids of party leaders (who are also rich kids).
I'm probably missing something but I'll ask anyway. I'm having trouble squaring the following: "a Black B-student with a handful of extracurriculars from an average American public high school will be able to get into a vast number of institutions generally and likely into several competitive institutions as well" with "American-born descendants of African slaves fill a scandalously low number of affirmative action seats".
Do you mean "...a scandalously low number *at Harvard*" or comparable institutions? I otherwise don't know what affirmative actions seats would be for if black B-students are getting into most colleges anyway.
Thank you for linking to the article on 4-year colleges opposing free community college. They absolutely want those students for themselves—and I am sure that the colleges lobbying against it include nonprofit 4years that pretend to have a big social justice mission.
Some private colleges are even starting their own 2-year programs, acting like it’s this noble service to the poor when really they’re hurting the local community college by competing with them. They’ve figured out that they can run low-cost programs and generate revenue from the students’ financial aid.
Non-selective schools just want students who can pay at all. Even if it just means filling out financial aid forms successfully (a sticking point for more than you’d think…) and passing enough classes to remain eligible for future financial aid.
Not to fixate on Harvard but... Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel proposes that elite colleges (i.e. Harvard) experiment with admitting half the class by lottery and then compare how those students perform compared to the other half of students admitted on the basis of so-called "merit." (The lottery would be after an initial weeding out of blatantly unqualified applicants).