Nick Hillman
Indiana University
Over the past several months, Amherst, Davidson, Brown, Duke, Princeton, Emory, Harvard, Stanford, and a handful of our nation’s elite colleges have made “groundbreaking” new commitments to helping poor students afford college. Basically, most of these colleges have promised all of their lowest income students that they can graduate debt free because the college will cover tuition. At first glance, this sounds like a great way to open up the gates to the ivory tower, but a deeper and more cynical look raises some doubts.
1) What counts as “low income?” Harvard thinks “low income” families are those that receive less than $180,000. Most of the other colleges say you’re poor if your family makes less than $65,000. Are they for real?! Sure, tuition costs an arm and a leg at private colleges, but why can’t these college rein in costs and reduce tuition? Here is a sad truth about American social policy: if the middle class doesn’t get a piece of the pie, nobody gets any pie! In the 1980’s, the federal Pell Grant income threshold was low but it slowly crept up to bring in more middle class students. Why? The feds would have killed the program otherwise since it was seen as an entitlement — a “handout.” So, savvy politicos in DC raised the eligiblity limit to appease middle class voters and make it a more inclusive policy that wouldn’t be seen as a handout to the poor. These colleges have taken a page out of this book and avoided that political pitfall by starting with inflated income thresholds so the middle/upper class students get a piece of the pie. All the while, Congress has pressured colleges to spend more of their endowments on financial aid, so these colleges simply let more students qualify rather than spending more on the poor.
2) Truly poor students (i.e. less than $30k rather than $65k+ per year) do not attend these colleges in the first place. These new “groundbreaking” aid programs have a minimal impact on college access for the poor. And, call my cynical, but the poorest of the poor students won’t be attending these colleges at high rates in the future regardless of these new aid promises. By inflating the eligibility threshold, more students appear to be “low income” so these colleges will pat themselves on their backs for opening up access to college when in fact they’re just using smoke and mirrors to make it look like they’re helping the poor. At most of the colleges listed above, only about one in ten students receives the federal Pell Grant. Several regional public colleges all across the US enroll more than 70 percent Pell recipients. Think about that for a minute. We would be fooling ourselves if we think that tens of thousands of smart poor kids will now be flooding into these colleges thanks to these new aid programs. I would be surprised if these institutions ever double the number of Pell Grant recipients attending their institutions. Higher education admission is a zero-sum game…for every poor kid Harvard lets in, that’s one legacy student or Senator’s son that doesn’t get in. Unfortunately, most colleges (especially elite ones) work opportunistically and serve their own best interests before serving students’ best interests, so it’s safe to bet that they won’t let too many legitimately poor kids in.
3) This is all just a reflection of society. The income inequality that exists in the US today is greater than any year since WWII. We have widening gap between the super-rich and the poor. The same story is taking place with regard to educational stratification…we see a handful of super-rich colleges (those mentioned above) that are amassing billion-dollar endowments while we have hundreds of community colleges and regional colleges that can barely keep their doors open let alone start endowment campaigns. This kind of inequality is intolerable in our education system and it’s an ugly side of this aid strategy that has gone overlooked.
Are these colleges really committed to social justice, or have they simply discovered a new PR technique that boosts their public image? Food for thought.
April 24, 2008 at 10:36 am |
Follow-up: the Chronicle of Higher Ed just wrote an in-depth analysis of this exact issue. It’s worth checking out for yourself at the link below, the article’s title is “Wealthy Colleges Show Drop in Enrollments of Needy Students.”
Here and here. The first link may require a subscription, sorry.
April 30, 2008 at 7:50 pm |
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August 30, 2008 at 6:35 pm |
Good point, but there is even more to it.
Who do you think is more likely to apply to and be accepted to an elite college, and fit in and suceed once there: The child of two college-educated parents who don’t make a lot of money (parents who are, say, musicians or artists, or a school teacher and stay-at-home mom), OR, the child of a well-paid blue-collar workers who never went beyond high school (say, a unionized heavy-equipment operator, a civil servant who worked up through the ranks, etc.), maybe with both parents working those decent-paying blue-collar jobs?
Very often, the first kid will be of a lower INCOME than the latter, but the second kid is in many ways more “disadvantaged”. The first kids’ parents may have chosen careers that don’t pay a lot, but they have gone to college and been exposed to a certain upper-middle-class know-how; thier kid will know more about negotiating the subtleties of elite milieus, whatever their finaincial situation. (And, I might add, will likely be admired for “overcoming” their “financial hardship”, and trotted out as an example of how generous the school is to the poor.) The second kid may be better off financialy, but will be much less savvy about how the world of the elite really works. That kid will receive little sympathy – after all, she/he isn’t POOR – but will be more of an outsider at an elite school than the first kid, and will struggle to fit in and figure it out.