So there’s a new piece in the New York Times magazine about college graduation rates, and how they are associated with student socioeconomic factors. The writer, Paul Tough, argues that these differences in graduation rates are largely attributable to economic differences. I wouldn’t contest the point; in fact I’m very glad to see him making it. But I think we have to be careful about how we think about these things.

When you read about those gaps, you might assume that they mostly have to do with ability. Rich kids do better on the SAT, so of course they do better in college. But ability turns out to be a relatively minor factor behind this divide. If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores. 

No doubt that these socioeconomic factors are largely to blame for differences in outcomes, but as the SAT is an imperfect predictor of college ability, we should be careful not to underestimate differences in ability, even as we insist that they are the fault of structural inequalities in our society, not individuals or parents. The point of talking about socioeconomic impacts on educational outcomes is to demonstrate how those impacts lead to differences in ability and thus to undermine the idea that such outcomes are a matter of “merit.” In other words, you can both believe that the income of parents is the better part of what’s determining this gap in graduation rates and think that gap reflects, in part, a gap in ability without contradiction. These are tangled, covariate, confounding phenomena.

Raising graduation rates is one of the most important tasks for those of us in postsecondary education. It happens, though, that I’m currently writing a dissertation about the assessment movement– or, if you prefer the more inflammatory nomenclature, the accountability movement– and it is jarring to see the basic contradiction in goals here. We college educators are receiving two directly conflicting messages: one, that college is too easy, that students are graduating without having learned anything, that grade inflation shows that our standards have fallen too low. I think the evidence does not support the stronger version of this claim, the Academically Adrift case, but this is the case that people make, and I am absolutely steeped in it right now– the claim that students are emerging from college without the necessary skills and standards need to be raised.

But the second message is largely the opposite: not enough students are graduating, or graduating in a timely manner, and we need to change that. Raising graduation rates and speeding up time to graduate necessarily means lowering standards. You can’t make a significant positive impact on the number of students who are graduating unless you make it easier for them to do so. And so we get it both ways at once: college is too easy and too hard, our standards too high and too low. We have to choose: college can become easier, and lose some predictive and instructional power, or it can become harder, and necessarily accrue its advantages to fewer people. We cannot do both, not in the real world.

This attitude, by the way, presumes that you accept the fact that human beings end up with substantially unequal ability to perform on the limited metrics the school reform movement favors, for myriad reasons, and are not endlessly malleable clay that can be molded into whatever form teachers want. Tough, in fairness, writes from the limited context of our national newsmedia, where talking about unequal ability– where expressing educational pessimism at all– is anathema. He reflects the same backwards conventional wisdom when he says,

But over the past 20 years, we have fallen from the top of those international lists; the United States now ranks 12th in the world in the percentage of young people who have earned a college degree. During the same period, a second trend emerged: American higher education became more stratified; most well-off students now do very well in college, and most middle- and low-income students struggle to complete a degree. These two trends are clearly intertwined. And it is hard to imagine that the nation can regain its global competitiveness, or improve its level of economic mobility, without reversing them.

I will keep insisting: this is backwards. We cannot reverse educational inequality without reversing its income inequality. Economic reform will lead to educational reform, but not the other way around.

All of this reflects a basic contradiction at the heart of how we talk about education: we treat it as both an engine of equality and a system for sorting talented from untalented, hard-working from slacking, good from bad. It can’t be both.