Our Universities: The Outrageous Reality
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.3 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.
.. Mettler points out that between 1980 and 2010, average spending on higher education slipped from 8 percent to 4 percent of state budgets.
.. 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.
.. 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.7
.. One ominous sign is that Hispanics and African-Americans, especially young men, are lagging badly behind whites in educational attainment. (see Figure 2 below) If these problems are not addressed, we are likely to become, if we are not already, what Mettler calls “a society with caste-like characteristics.”
.. Under President Obama, however, and with more aggressive scrutiny by state attorneys general, government oversight has tightened. Enrollment at the University of Phoenix has dropped by close to two thirds.
.. David Rosen, an English professor who writes that just when we “appear to be entering a new Gilded Age, with institutions of higher learning as willing or unwitting accomplices,” faculty—many of whom call themselves leftists—“seem ready to politicize everything but the immense changes occurring before their very noses.”26 Decrying inequality is commonplace on many college campuses these days, but the question seldom comes up whether the college itself is helping or hurting through its own admissions and aid practices, and if it’s the latter, what might be done about it.