May 30, 2007--What Works Week: Educating the Poor

If you’re poor, sometimes it takes more than help with the tuition to be able to go to college. Sometimes, if your hometown is, say, Miami and you want to go to Amherst up in northern Massachusetts, you need money to buy a winter coat. Scholarships for tuition, room, and board, even full scholarships, do not cover that and this can mean that even if you are fortunate enough to get admitted to a highly-selective college such as Amherst, for the want of a warm coat you’ll have to turn them down.

If elite colleges and universities are serious about wanting to have a diverse socio-economic student body, something they have been been expressing an interest in for at least four decades, they will have to deal with issues beyond the high cost of tuition to bring their reality into alignment with their rhetoric because, in spite of all these good intentions (even granting that they have been sincere—though I am reluctant to do so), to truly diversify their enrollments they will need to find ways to pay for winter coats, travel costs associated with going home for school holidays, and other things of this kind that their more economically fortunate students and their families routinely take for granted.

These colleges had better think about matters of this kind since there has been very little progress during all this time. A 2004 study by the Century Foundation found that three-quarters of students at leading colleges came from families that were in the top socioeconomic quartile, with only one-tenth coming from the lower half and a mere 3 percent from the lowest quartile. (See linked NY Times article.)

Additionally, in a 1998 study of 28 of the countries most-selective universities, it was “discovered” that 86 percent of their African-American students were middle- or upper-middle class. Further, a disproportionate percentage were not African-American at all but rather were children or grandchildren from Afro-Caribbean families.

That’s the bad or hypocritical news. But there is also good news—this seemingly intractable social problem, gross inequality in higher education, is not intractable. To make a difference, there are things colleges can do. Helping their poorest students with living expenses (pizza and haircut money); removing the burden of massive debt by replacing loans with grants; and eliminating early-admissions programs that favor richer, savvier students. In fact these are not pie-in-the-sky ideas. Colleges such as Amherst, Harvard, Princeton, Williams, and the University of North Carolina are already doing all of this and it is working—their student bodies are much more economically diverse than in the past.

What is a little frustrating is that what they have “discovered” about the needs of very low-income students has been known for as many decades as these colleges have been attempting to act affirmatively. As a very young higher educator back in the 1970s, with colleagues, I “discovered” that our poorest students had needs that went beyond help with tuition. For example, since back in the “hood” it wasn’t “cool” to go to college, friends of our students who were hanging out on street corners hustling and selling dope would snatch and destroy their books. So we needed to raise money to pay for two sets—one to be kept at the college and another to be left at home. Problem solved and most of our students did quite well.