THE MERITOCRACY MARCHES ON: As my son closed in on college age, I warned him about the super-competitive application process. I sometimes joked: “I doubt if my alma mater, Humongous Florida University, would admit me now.” Not so funny. A report in the New York Times continuing series “Class Matters” says this: “Colleges have come to reinforce many of the advantages of birth. On campuses that enroll poorer students, graduation rates are often low. And at institutions where nearly everyone graduates -- small colleges like Colgate, major state institutions like the University of Colorado and elite private universities like Stanford -- more students today come from the top of the nation's income ladder than they did two decades ago.” My son is planning for two years at a community college. Which may help him avoid being one of these statistics: “Only 41 percent of low-income students entering a four-year college managed to graduate within five years, the Department of Education found in a study last year, but 66 percent of high-income students did. That gap had grown over recent years. ‘We need to recognize that the most serious domestic problem in the United States today is the widening gap between the children of the rich and the children of the poor,’ Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, said last year when announcing that Harvard would give full scholarships to all its lowest-income students. ‘And education is the most powerful weapon we have to address that problem.’ “ Fine. But it doesn’t matter if you don’t have the grades or the dough to get in.
