At the top of the prestige pyramid, in highly selective colleges like those of the Ivy League, students from the bottom income quartile in our society make up around 5 percent of the enrollments. This meager figure is often explained as the consequence of a regrettable reality: qualified students from disadvantaged backgrounds simply do not exist in significant numbers. But it’s not so. A recent study by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard shows that the great majority of high-achieving low-income students (those scoring at or above the ninetieth percentile on standardized tests, and with high school grades of A- or higher) never apply to any selective college, much less to several, as their better-off peers typically do. Their numbers, which Hoxby and Avery estimate at between 25,000 and 35,000 of each year’s high school seniors, “are much greater than college admissions staff generally believe,” in part because most such students get little if any counseling in high school about the intricate process of applying to a selective college—so they rarely do.
As for the colleges themselves, searching for more qualified low-income students and providing financial aid for them as well as for middle-income students are likely to require compensatory reductions in budgets for competing priorities. Scholarships for needy students can be solicited from donors—but there are “opportunity costs” in the sense that asking alumni to give to the scholarship fund precludes or reduces their giving for other purposes such as faculty chairs or a new dorm or gym. At my own university, which has lately raised billions of dollars in large part to finance a campus expansion, the percentage of college students receiving financial aid has, inexcusably, declined.
Meanwhile, at public institutions, which enroll many more students than private colleges—some 14 million of the roughly 18 million undergraduates who attend nonprofit colleges—subsidies to keep college affordable have also been dropping. Mettler points out that between 1980 and 2010, average spending on higher education slipped from 8 percent to 4 percent of state budgets. Some states have seen a modest recovery since the Great Recession, but recently the governors of Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Illinois have proposed new cuts.
As a result, the cost of public higher education has shifted markedly from taxpayers to students and their families, in the form of rapidly rising tuition. Between 2000 and 2008, the proportion of family income required for families in the bottom income quintile to cover the average cost of attending a four-year public institution rose from 39 percent to 55 percent. For top-quintile families over that same period, the corresponding rise went from 7 percent to 9 percent.
The story these numbers tell is of a higher education system—public and private—that is reflecting the stratification of our society more than resisting it. Those students who do get to college are distributed, like airline passengers, into distinct classes of service, but with incomparably larger and lingering effects. In 2010, private nonprofit universities, whose students tend to be relatively affluent, spent on average nearly $50,000 per student—with the wealthiest colleges spending nearly double that amount. At public four-year institutions expenditure per student was $36,000, while community colleges, where minority and first-generation students are concentrated and which stress vocational training and offer associate rather than bachelor degrees, could spend just $12,000 per student. Moreover, while the number of Pell grants for needy students has jumped over the last forty years from half a million to more than ten million, a Pell grant in the 1970s covered four fifths of total cost at the average four-year public university. Today it covers less than one third.
These numerical disparities have stark human consequences. Getting through college can be a challenge even for confident students with families on whom they can count to cushion the shock if a parent falls ill or loses a job, or if unexpected expenses arise. For students without such a buffer, college can be a very hard road indeed. Yet in our current system the relation between vulnerability and support is an inverse one. One result is that graduation rates are the same for low-income students with high test scores as for high-income students with low scores. In the United States today, three of every five children from families in the top income quartile earn a bachelor’s degree by age twenty-four, while for those in the bottom quartile the rate is one in four (see Figure 1).
These are indefensible realities in a nation that claims to believe in equal opportunity. Yet some people look at this picture and say that the whole idea of mass higher education was misguided from the start—that the United States should have emulated instead the European model of test-based tracking by which a select few are chosen early in life for university training that leads to public service or the professions, while the rest are channeled into vocational schools or the trades.
by Andrew Delbanco, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Getty Images
As for the colleges themselves, searching for more qualified low-income students and providing financial aid for them as well as for middle-income students are likely to require compensatory reductions in budgets for competing priorities. Scholarships for needy students can be solicited from donors—but there are “opportunity costs” in the sense that asking alumni to give to the scholarship fund precludes or reduces their giving for other purposes such as faculty chairs or a new dorm or gym. At my own university, which has lately raised billions of dollars in large part to finance a campus expansion, the percentage of college students receiving financial aid has, inexcusably, declined.Meanwhile, at public institutions, which enroll many more students than private colleges—some 14 million of the roughly 18 million undergraduates who attend nonprofit colleges—subsidies to keep college affordable have also been dropping. Mettler points out that between 1980 and 2010, average spending on higher education slipped from 8 percent to 4 percent of state budgets. Some states have seen a modest recovery since the Great Recession, but recently the governors of Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Illinois have proposed new cuts.
As a result, the cost of public higher education has shifted markedly from taxpayers to students and their families, in the form of rapidly rising tuition. Between 2000 and 2008, the proportion of family income required for families in the bottom income quintile to cover the average cost of attending a four-year public institution rose from 39 percent to 55 percent. For top-quintile families over that same period, the corresponding rise went from 7 percent to 9 percent.
The story these numbers tell is of a higher education system—public and private—that is reflecting the stratification of our society more than resisting it. Those students who do get to college are distributed, like airline passengers, into distinct classes of service, but with incomparably larger and lingering effects. In 2010, private nonprofit universities, whose students tend to be relatively affluent, spent on average nearly $50,000 per student—with the wealthiest colleges spending nearly double that amount. At public four-year institutions expenditure per student was $36,000, while community colleges, where minority and first-generation students are concentrated and which stress vocational training and offer associate rather than bachelor degrees, could spend just $12,000 per student. Moreover, while the number of Pell grants for needy students has jumped over the last forty years from half a million to more than ten million, a Pell grant in the 1970s covered four fifths of total cost at the average four-year public university. Today it covers less than one third.
These numerical disparities have stark human consequences. Getting through college can be a challenge even for confident students with families on whom they can count to cushion the shock if a parent falls ill or loses a job, or if unexpected expenses arise. For students without such a buffer, college can be a very hard road indeed. Yet in our current system the relation between vulnerability and support is an inverse one. One result is that graduation rates are the same for low-income students with high test scores as for high-income students with low scores. In the United States today, three of every five children from families in the top income quartile earn a bachelor’s degree by age twenty-four, while for those in the bottom quartile the rate is one in four (see Figure 1).
These are indefensible realities in a nation that claims to believe in equal opportunity. Yet some people look at this picture and say that the whole idea of mass higher education was misguided from the start—that the United States should have emulated instead the European model of test-based tracking by which a select few are chosen early in life for university training that leads to public service or the professions, while the rest are channeled into vocational schools or the trades.
by Andrew Delbanco, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Getty Images
