Anti-elitism runs so deep in American culture that even our founding fathers thought it was old news. In 1813 Thomas Jefferson warned that the “artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents,” represented “a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.” Like James Madison and Ben Franklin, he worried that this elite was interested in protecting its own privileges rather than the good of the Republic.

Madison, Franklin and Jefferson agreed on one major antidote to the evils of hereditary privilege: education. Jefferson started a university, in part, to pull “from the rubbish,” as he once put it, students who lacked economic resources but who made up for it with drive and intelligence. From their ranks, he envisioned a new class of leaders based on talent rather than fortune.

Through much of the 1800s up to the middle of the 1900s, education was widely regarded as stimulating social mobility and innovation. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the relative lack of hereditary institutions in the United States made education a crucial means through which citizens could rise in the world. “All that serves to fortify, to expand and to embellish intelligence,” he wrote, “immediately acquires a great value.”

This became the dream of countless immigrants throughout the 20th century. They saw higher education as a primary vehicle for changing their economic and social fortunes.

Today, that system has attracted a great deal of criticism for accomplishing the opposite outcome. It’s still true that when poor people attend a highly selective university, they are likely to greatly improve their economic prospects, but a majority of those attending such schools are from wealthy families. It’s those families that can enroll their children in the best public or private schools and afford tutors, coaches and fancy résumé-boosting summer programs.

So while some universities have eliminated tuition for those with few resources, students from the bottom 20 percent of the nation’s income distribution still make up only about 5 percent of the student bodies at selective institutions. This hasn’t changed much in 100 years.

In the dwindling days of a spectacularly dreadful season, many White Sox fans are averting their eyes. On Sunday, the team lost for the 120th time this year, tying the major league record for most losses by a modern-day team in a single season.

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