Enough About Harvard. Let’s Talk About CUNY.
The elite media loves to obsess about the Ivy Leagues. But great public colleges like the City University of New York, once dubbed the Harvard of the proletariat, are far more relevant to most people — and infinitely better at serving the working class.
Baruch College, City University of New York. (Education Images / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
We’ve been hearing an awful lot about Harvard University lately.
In the wake of the Supreme Court decision rejecting Harvard’s use of affirmative action in admissions, President Joe Biden and his top education official, Miguel Cardona, have been criticizing Harvard’s use of legacy admissions, the practice of giving preference to the children of alumni, and filed a complaint against the university. Biden and Cardona — neither of whom hold any elite degrees, which is unusual for those at the top of the US ruling class — are correct: research has shown that the rich have an enormous advantage in gaining admission to Ivy League colleges, and that preference for legacies is a key reason.
At Harvard, 67 percent of students hail from the top 20 percent of the income ladder, while only 4.5 percent come from the bottom 20 percent. The median family income of Harvard students is a whopping $168,800.
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