Technology Elite Have Education Mission

By DINESH D’SOUZA

In past eras, the wealthy classes often dedicated themselves to large social objectives, whether it was teaching piety and bourgeois values to the poor in Victorian England or teaching trades to newly freed slaves in the American South. Today’s technology elite should adopt a similarly unifying mission: to give all American children, regardless of means, the chance to attend the best private schools and universities in the country, provided they have the ability to be admitted on their merits.

Such an endeavor would vindicate the idealism of today’s technology executives. It would promote a new kind of philanthropy that would produce tangible results and make society better.

Right now there are probably thousands of very bright youngsters who are forced to attend inferior public schools because their parents cannot afford to send them to good private schools.

Republicans have, over the years, advanced proposals to provide tuition credits and vouchers to give parents a choice to select private schools for their children. Some technology tycoons, such as venture capitalist Tim Draper, have backed ballot measures to give poor children the economic access to private schools that the rich already have. Such measures are controversial, however, because they favor using tax money to pay for private schools — including private religious schools — and take money away from the public schools.

A better solution would be to leave the government out of it. The constitutional role of the government is to provide equal rights for all. The government does this by making public-school education available to all students, and by supporting state universities that cater to the educational needs of residents of that particular state. It is entirely proper for the government to establish an educational floor below which no one should, at least in theory, fall. But it doesn’t seem right for the government to pay for your child but not mine to go to Deerfield Academy.

It is appropriate, therefore, for philanthropy to rise to the occasion. To be sure, some philanthropists view their role as primarily one of stimulating the government to take action. That attitude made sense in an era when private foundations could not undertake large social tasks on their own because they simply didn’t have the means. But that era is past, and a new, more self-confident attitude is called for.

Fortunately, that self-confidence already exists in the technology field. Thus it is time for the new technology elite to say to poor parents: If your child can get into Deerfield Academy or Saint Louis Country Day School, we will make sure he or she has the means to attend.

That approach can also be extended to university education. I know, because I am a living example of it. When I first came to this country from Bombay as an exchange student in the late 1970s, I was astonished to discover that many highly selective colleges — including the eight Ivy League universities — had a policy that said, if you can get in, we will make available a package of loans and grants to enable you to enroll.

These colleges are able to do that because they are fantastically well-endowed, thanks to the long-time generosity of their alumni. The only reason I was able to attend Dartmouth College was the existence of such a need-based financial-aid program.

What a glorious thing it would be to offer to all Americans the chance to go to the United States’ best universities if they are smart and hard-working enough to get admitted. It is difficult to imagine a better incentive to young people across the United States to do their best, knowing that the gates not just of higher education but also of the country’s most prestigious universities are open to them irrespective of means.

No centralized coordination is needed to get this idea off the ground, and then to expand its scope to achieve its full purpose. Philanthropists can simply work with the private schools and universities of their choice — perhaps their alma maters — and endow aid programs aimed at attracting the best and brightest students. The donors should insist that the scholarships be based strictly on need and that admission to the institution be based strictly on merit.

It will be tempting for private schools and universities to twist and bend admissions criteria to serve other social objectives, such as achieving ethnic diversity, or increasing the enrollment of international students, or exposing affluent students to the culture of the less well-off. School and university officials, who love such social-engineering schemes, are certain to suggest such diversions. But however valuable such social objectives may be, they are not consistent with the mission being recommended here; indeed, in some ways they undermine it.

The goal I am advocating is to make merit consistent with egalitarianism: to extend equal opportunity to get a top-notch education to every young American. Such a mission is likely to be attractive to a technology elite that has achieved its wealth not through inheritance but through intelligence, creativity, and hard work. Here is a group that has succeeded based on merit, yet it is one that recognizes that ability, in order to be realized, requires opportunity. The means to expand those frontiers of opportunity now exist. The question is whether there is the will to rise to the task.

Dinesh D’Souza is a research scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno-Affluence, has just been published by the Free Press. He can be reached at ddsouza@aei.org.