From 2012 Nobel Prize Winner Al Roth (Market Design).
We used to see universities in the US as one of the great engines of social mobility. Think in ourselves as an immigrant nation. My grandparents came from Russia and were tailors. My parents went to college and were high school teachers. I got a phd and I’m now profesor. That was the kind of story we like to tell. Now we worry than that’s less and less true. Rather than be an engines of social mobility, colleges maybe becoming the way that well often educated transmit their inheritance to their children. It’s more complicated than money. Once admitted to Harvard or Stanford, finances are not the problem. The problem is that too few families whose income is 50.000 dollars a year are able to provide the education before college to their kids that’s needed to be admitted to Harvard or Stanford. We have a problem that we haven’t figure out yet, which is how to get talented children from all parts of society to come to universities and get the right kind of education. I think it’s harder for children whose parents have not been to college to want to go to college and to get themselves read to do it. If you live in a community where everyone goes to college, then you know a high school, what colleges, what kind of courses youshould take... It’s a whole path.
We used to see universities in the US as one of the great engines of social mobility. Think in ourselves as an immigrant nation. My grandparents came from Russia and were tailors. My parents went to college and were high school teachers. I got a phd and I’m now profesor. That was the kind of story we like to tell. Now we worry than that’s less and less true. Rather than be an engines of social mobility, colleges maybe becoming the way that well often educated transmit their inheritance to their children. It’s more complicated than money. Once admitted to Harvard or Stanford, finances are not the problem. The problem is that too few families whose income is 50.000 dollars a year are able to provide the education before college to their kids that’s needed to be admitted to Harvard or Stanford. We have a problem that we haven’t figure out yet, which is how to get talented children from all parts of society to come to universities and get the right kind of education. I think it’s harder for children whose parents have not been to college to want to go to college and to get themselves read to do it. If you live in a community where everyone goes to college, then you know a high school, what colleges, what kind of courses youshould take... It’s a whole path.
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