PROMOTING INEQUALITY: Assortative Mating at the Ivy League, where rich students marry rich students, and poor students are left out.

Growing income inequality is a central fault line in American society. Assortative mating might seem like a strange thing to blame, though. After all, in theory, everyone has a chance to go to college. By those lights, if people who work hard and become educated want to marry each other, that’s just how things are.

In reality, access to higher education remains highly unequal. Elite colleges that recruit students with large amounts of social and financial capital get much more public funding than open-access schools that enroll a greater number of academically and economically diverse students. Rising tuition prices make it difficult for low-income students to enroll and graduate, and leave many with large debts. Inequality then becomes intergenerational. . . .

As the sociological research and new data show, even within individual universities, social experiences and long-term outcomes are widely unequal. Instead of being places that provide equal opportunity to everyone based on merit, colleges are often complicit in the forces that push us apart.

If we’re serious about reducing inequality, we really need to abolish the Ivy League. Though I suspect that sexual-harassment rules that prevent doctors from dating nurses and bosses from dating secretaries exacerbate the assortative mating problem.