Efforts to increase equal opportunity in America have been frustrated for many years. Racial gaps in upward mobility persist; children of low-income families fall further behind children of affluent families. Why hasn’t progress been made since the social programs of the 1960s and ‘70s and the many school reform movements in the last decades?
Three scholars–Stanford sociologist David Grusky, Harvard political scientist Peter Hall, and Stanford psychologist Hazel Markus–have just offered a useful way to understand what has thwarted expanded equal opportunity for American youth. In the latest issue of Daedalus, they describe the rise, expansion, and operation of what they call “opportunity markets.” The idea, simply put, is that increasingly the very opportunities for children to succeed are up for sale and, of course, wealthy parents can and do buy more opportunities than less affluent parents can.
I’ll start the explanation–although the authors do not start this way–with a first axiom: parental love.
Giving Them Every Chance
Modern American parents generally will do all they can to enable their children to succeed. This impulse should not be taken for granted; it is not a universal. In other cultures and times, parents prioritize what the children can do for them, such as work the farm rather than go to school, apprentice themselves out for money, or care for infirm relatives. As historians of childhood have shown, over the course the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, American parents began working for their children rather than vice-versa. And in recent decades, the competition among American parents to do the most for the kids has accelerated. In this competition, the wealthy, of course, can do much more for their children than can others.
Grusky, Hall, and Markus describe the “opportunity markets” that have opened or expanded recently, particularly with respect to children’s education. Parents can buy better schooling, mainly by buying homes in the highest-quality school districts they can afford, which in turn provides better opportunities for children’s life success. The U.S. has a very decentralized educational system and the quality of the public schools can vary greatly from one block to the next if the blocks are in different towns or school districts. Parents buy into “good” neighborhoods not just for the schools they provide, but also for the safety, enrichment programs, and concentration of high-achieving kids such neighborhoods provide. No wonder, then, that income segregation has increased in recent decades and increased only or mostly among families with children (see, e.g., here, here, and here).
Money also works in the opportunity markets for quality childcare, extracurricular activities, and personal coaching. I would add that there are opportunity markets even earlier in the life cycle. Money can buy more control over the timing of births, better prenatal care, and more household help when parenting. Affording these services increases the chances of children growing into achieving adults.
Opportunity markets operate for older children when applying to college, graduating college, and getting launched afterwards. College graduation helps equalize rates of upward mobility for youth of different backgrounds, but the chances of getting into and then graduating college are very skewed–and have become more skewed (see here and here). Post-graduate degrees have become more important and there, too, parental advantage translates into greater opportunities. Besides noting the obvious ways wealth matters–financial capacity to afford tuition and board–Grusky, Hall, and Markus discuss how well-off parents can spend “the money necessary to build a resume laden with signals of merit” for their children to submit when they apply to selective colleges, signals like arts and sports skills, high SAT scores, travel experience, internships, and philanthropic activities.
More and more then, opportunities for success are for sale–from the market in nannies to the market in volunteer tourism (and even to pharmaceutical assistance.) Since the well-off can afford more, we have seen not an equalizing of opportunity, but its opposite. The proliferation and pervasiveness of opportunity markets also helps explain why the U.S. has fallen behind other countries in upward social mobility (see, e.g., here, here, and here).
What to Do?
If Grusky, Hall, and Markus are correct, what can be done to make opportunity more equal, given that parents with means will not give up doing the best for their kids (see parental love, above). The authors lay out three options.
One would be substantially redistributing wealth so that parents would have more equal buying power in the opportunity markets. This, they say, is politically unlikely.
Another strategy would be expanding “public options.” If the U.S. substantially boosted the availability and quality of public healthcare, childcare, schools, universities, and the like, it would raise the opportunities for less-advantaged children–as the social democratic societies of Europe have done. Parents can buy private services in the markets if they wish, but the public options are many and of quality. The U.S. has experience with such public goods: Medicare has leveled out a lot of health and economic inequality in old age. Grusky, Hall, and Markus, however, doubt that the public funds for such programs will be forthcoming.
Their third and recommended option is an interesting idea, a sort of voluntary economic affirmative action for higher education: Colleges would admit students not according to who has the best academic credentials but according to who has the best academic credentials among students of similar income background. That is, colleges should take the top students from each of, say, ten levels of family income, admitting the same number of students from the poorest families as from the richest families. This is a bold idea, but Grusky, Hall, and Markus argue that if a few elite institutions pioneered such a policy, it could trickle down–as a “norm cascade”–to other institutions. The authors acknowledge that many complexities would have to be worked out and that admitting students by “income tranche” might be only a partial solution, but they argue that this plan could be a major equalizer of opportunity–and would be more feasible than the other proposals.
I am more a fan of public options. Nonetheless, Grusky, Hall, and Markus have done us a service in helping frame and understand the systematic dynamics that accentuate inequality of opportunity in the United States. Given parents’ desire to do the most for their children, growing inequality of wealth X growing “opportunity markets” = Growing inequality of opportunity.
