It never ceases to amaze me how private and public policy often work together to help the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  In their educational arms race to improve U.S. News and World Report rankings, many private institutions have adopted  merit-based, instead of need-based, financial aid policies.

Incredibly, many of these institutions – in a throwback to long-discredited trickle-down economic theories – argue that such policies will help poor students in the long run by allowing them to attract more funds and do more for poor students.

In a recent study appropriately titled “Keeping Up with the Joneses,” a Wake Forest economics professor explodes that myth.  Not the slightest bit surprisingly, such institutions enroll smaller shares of Pell grant recipients and African-American students ten years after adopting such policies.