I know — it’s not Plamegate. No indictments, no intrigue. Just a basic threat to our national existence.
Those from families with the highest income and education levels finished college at more than double the rate of high-scoring students from the lowest socioeconomic grouping.
Sandy Baum, a College Board analyst, said the data showed that college completion increasingly was “not about academic preparation; it’s about money.”
Let’s stop and think about the above paragraphs. Family income – not academic potential – is just as important in completing college. For a middle class family that wants to better the lives of their children, this is simply wrong. It’s not about the time you study, the sacrifices you make to intellectually prepare yourself for a better life. It’s about whether your parents can afford the cost.
Not including room, board and books, the tuition and fees at four-year public colleges rose this year by a national average of about 7%, to $5,491.
Private four-year schools raised their tuition by an average of about 6%, to $21,235, the group reported.
Financial aid did not keep pace with tuition increases this year, continuing a trend, the reports said. The average net tuition and fees — the price paid after financial aid is awarded — was $11,600 for private college students, up from an inflation-adjusted $9,500 a decade ago. Public college net tuition and fees averaged $2,200, increasing from a real price of $1,900 a decade ago.
Here’s the short version of what has happened in the last few decades. States have continually decreased their funding for their own universities. Instead, they have passed the increase onto students who have to take out larger loans to pay for education. The result is more graduates are now leaving college either before graduation before they graduate because of the financial burden, or more people are graduating with a larger debt load, thus preventing them from moving up the socio-economic scale. Here’s the result of this policy:
Within the lowest socioeconomic sample, 75% of the high-scoring eighth-graders eventually enrolled in college, but 29% had earned college degrees eight years after high school graduation. Ninety-nine percent of high-scoring eighth-graders within the highest socioeconomic sample attended college, with 74% earning degrees. High scorers in the middle two socioeconomic groups entered college at a 91% rate, with 47% earning degrees.
If you’re rich, you have a better chance of graduating. The land of opportunity in action.
We’re even getting hit with this up here in Canada, but it’s even worse in some ways.
Ontario, the biggest province in the country, used to have 13+kindergarten grades of primary schooling, instead of the 12+kindergarten grades used by the rest of the country. They phased this out two years ago, which resulted in a massive increase in the number of students flooding into the university system nation-wide over the past two years. (Two years because the first year, you got a double class. The second year you got a normal class, but many of the Ontario universities were already over capacity, so more than usual spilled over to the rest of the country)
All well and good, except that most universities (especially the two here in Halifax – Dalhousie and St. Mary’s) reacted by increasing their tuition. The students protested, but there were too many new students who wanted a college education, and none of the existing ones were willing to dump their time and money investment on principle. And really, they did need to do it – the funding from the provincial and federal governments simply wasn’t enough for the construction and faculty needed to handle the sudden jump in size of the student body.
Now, that wave of students has subsided. Those in three-year programs are close to graduating. And suddenly, all these universities are looking around and noticing that enrolment is down. Way down. Dal and St. Mary’s have started massive advertising campaigns to try and attract new students, with little success by most accounts. And to make things even worse, for the first time in years, we have a Student Union here at Dal that is not in favour of tuition cuts. Because they’re a bunch of rich kids that want to return Dal to the “university for rich, well-connected people” status it had during the ’60s.
Great way to get the student body interested in student politics again, but I digress. This problem was caused, at it’s root, by the federal and provincial governments not providing enough funding to the universities. They should’ve been the ones to provide the money to handle the excess capacity, and they should’ve been providing more to start with.
I’m sure the correlation of money and completing college is also related to the class apartheid inherent in the way we fund public school systems.
Absolutely. I taught freshman cell and molecular biology for a year at Big State U here. It’s a really tough course, a classic “weed out” course. 165 students – most have declared premed as their major. Top of their classes, great SAT’s, pretty much by definition, or they wouldn’t have gotten the idea that med school was an option for them.
But, but, but. It became immediately apparent that there was a real class divide. About half the students had no trouble keeping up – and guess what? They were the ones from affluent suburban schools They’d had two years of high school biology, minimum. Most of those second year HS courses were AP or even IB. In labs they were doing things like DNA fingerprinting or gene cloning. Often the second year covered essentially the same material as the college course they were now enrolled in – though the college course had a more depth and detail. Still, not too difficult for any such student willing to do the work.
The other half of the students really struggled. They worked hard, but were overwhelmed. And again, you won’t be surprised to learn that they were from the inner city or rural schools that offered only one year of biology in HS. No AP courses and don’t even think about IB. The course that was available was generally taught in a poorly equipped lab by a barely qualified or outright unqualified teacher. They were lucky if they got to dissect a frog. Most couldn’t pass. End of dream of becoming a doctor – in the first semester of their freshman year. It broke my heart. This is one reason I no longer teach at Big State U – I much prefer the community college where I am now – with 24 students per class and the time to offer extra help to the less prepared.
(I once asked my students in a (college!) microbiology class how many of them had ever used a microscope. Only half raised their hands. I was stunned, so I quizzed them further. Yes, half had come from high schools that had no microscopes.)
In America, we have “good schools” and “bad schools.” The primary determinate of real estate prices is often whether the address is in the zone for a “good school” or not.
Why do we tolerate this? It is outrageous.
I ranted in even more detail over at EuroTrib in their “American poverty” discussion.
Schools are funded by property taxes, property taxes are dependent on real estate values, real estate values are dependent on school quality. K-12 School funding must be changed, but the politics will be near impossible.
You are right of course. However, this ties in to what I was trying to say over in Paul’s framing diary (came late to the party – my comment is way down the thread).
We go round and round about school funding – our state lege went through a regular session and two special sessions called specifically to deal with school funding and came up with nothin’. All schools in Texas are underfunded and the inequalities between schools are so appalling that the state is under court order to do something about it – and hasn’t.
We should quit spending all our time dickering about this funding formula vs. that one. We should step back and think about why we care about it and what crappy schools in poor neighborhoods are doing to children growing up in poor neighborhoods. We should be screaming from the rooftops – This is fucking unfair! This is unjust! This violates everything we as Americans purport to believe in, beginning with “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . “
We’ll never be able to come up with a “funding formula” that fixes the problem until we can get people to look honestly at what the problem is and question why we are tolerating this kind of injustice.
Thanks for posting about this, Bonddad. I hope it’s okay with you if I take this as an opportunity to plug one of my “pet” issues:
It can be extremely difficult for GLBTQ students to even get in the university door due to lack of funding — not necessarily because their parents don’t have it, but because they won’t give it. College money is often used by homophobic parents as a way to try to manipulate gay teens into rejecting and denying their sexuality. And since it’s become practically impossible for a student to get substantive financial aid independent of that student’s family, and many GLBTQ kids have families who turn them out, these kids are effectively cut off from student loans and Pell grant aid until they’re 22. That’s a long time to delay college, and it only drives up the cost for them even higher since tuition goes up practically every year. So just being gay can mean you have to come out of pocket yourself for college even if your family was able to afford it, and then when it comes out of your pocket, it costs 25% more because you had to wait to go.
Marriage can establish a younger student as an independent subject to qualify for financial aid without their parents, but of course, marriage is one of the rights not accorded to queer people except in Massachusetts. It is true that, as Bonddad says, “If you’re rich you have a better chance of graduating.” And it is also true that, “If you’re straight you have a better chance at getting to the first day of class.”
On the up side, there is now a reasonable list of scholarship opportunities for queer students, which is certainly a step in the right direction even though it’s constantly decried as a “special rights” sort of a thing, but full legal equality would be among the best ways to help these kids out.
Isn’t there another way to establish autonomy from parents rather than to age out or to marry? Sort of like an emancipated minor, though not legally a minor. I know people whose parents had money but refused to help with college for a variety of reasons including not agreeing with the choice of college or area of study, and wanting the kid to do it on their own because it means more. These kids just paid for it all on their own with loans.
Financial aid policies are highly variable from campus to campus, but the federal guidelines are of course the same. Here’s the dependency worksheet for next fall. So yeah, you can be in the military to establish independence (so long as no one asks and you don’t tell), or you can be an orphan/ward of the court. Or you can have dependent kids of your own — not a whole lot of oopsie babies in the teen years from gay kids, though. 🙂
You can also try to arrange private loans, which can sometimes happen but are almost always at higher interest rates and without the lock-in rate feature that federal loans have. It’s very difficult to get a good loan when you’re 18 and have no money, no credit, no one to cosign, and no immediate career prospects. And Pell grants, which don’t have to be paid back, are federal aid.
Considering a lot of gay kids in the circumstance I described find themselves (as I did, back in the 80s) suddenly homeless and suddenly learning that they do not even legally own their own underwear, wandering through the Byzantine maze of non-traditional finaid can be another thing that’s just too much to manage. Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely better for gay kids today than it was 20 years ago, but they are still stopped up by obstacles that only exist due to cultural and institutionalized bigotry.
That whole FAFSA thing is a freaking merry-go-round of fun. Last year, my duaghter’s father (my ex) refused to furnish us with his W’2’s (probably because he didn’t want me to find out he’s making more than his child support payments would indicate) so we had to use my husband’s (her stepfather)income on the FAFSA which disqualified her for financial aid of any kind. His income looks on the high side, but he pays alimony and child support, and do they really want to put the onus of paying for college on a brand new step-parent? My husband was generous and kind and we came up with about half her expenses, but if we’d just been able to claim her real father’s much lower income, she’d have gotten aid. Now we get to do the same thing again with her, and now her brother this year.
It is a ridiculous process. Another one of the great ironies in life — in order to effectively navigate an application for college financial aid, one must already have a college education.
THis would explain the fits of tears and hair-pulling before finally, defeated, passing it on to my husband.
Replying to my own post is surely criteria for some kind of DSM diagnosis, isn’t it? I just wanted to elaborate a little on one point:
I should also have pointed out that due to DOMA the federal government does not recognize marriages between gay people anyway, so even though their marriages are indeed legal in MA, afaik this does nothing to help them reclassify as independent for federal financial aid purposes.
Thanks again for signing that DOMA trash, Bill! The same sarcastic thanks also go out to the following high profile Democrats who voted for DOMA: Biden, Durbin, Daschle, Gephardt, Harkin, Leahy, Lieberman, Mikulski & Reid.
I would guess the dropout rate also has to do with declining job prospects for new hires. If someone from the lower socio-economic quintile is accumulating thousands of dollars of debt to attend college, they are probably get discouraged seeing their older peers graduating without good job prospects, or job prospects that pay pitifully low wages.
or are they to scared to engage in partisan blame game? This country really is going to hell and I don’t feel I have a party that represents me. Where’s Hillary and Biden? Are they having dinner with the credit card lobbyists?
I saw the Dems were offering a contract with America, and universal college education was one of the points. They better keep that in there.
Working with High School kids from inner city Detroit and Chicago schools through the FIRST Robotics program has been both rewrding and exceptionally frustrating. These are kids who have an interest in engineerng, computers math and science in general, the very people whose minds we will need in the future. I see their interests and talents wasted. I don’t mean to be all negative, there have been some bright lights, but the “class aparthied” mentioned above is rampant. The exurbs have the most powerful programs and sponsorships. (My company chose to sponsor teams in need, instead of teams with the best potential for success) The Detroit area has some exceptions in the “black” suburbs, but the inner city schools are desperate. Same in Chicago.
The worst part about the experience is the defeatism of the poorer kids. The FIRST program has scholarships, I hired exclusively kids that went on to college from the program as co-ops, local State Universities and Community Colleges were offering up scholarships and recruiting at events, politicians spoke to the kids (Thanks to Rep. Conyers), successful engineers, faculty, mentors etc. all try to push the kids forward, but there is still a class related defeatism that is very hard to shake. Most poorer kids have just never pictured themselves going to college. Including even a few I’ve worked with who are bright enough to offer full ride scholarships. This just eats my heart out.
Wow, that rambled way off topic. Sorry.
No it didn’t. It’s right on target. Poor kids have less chance of going to college for financial reasons, not because they are less qualified.
and more sophisticated, in many ways than their more affluent counterparts.
Bringing in local success stories, homie from the hood made good, to serve as examples that it can be done is admirable, but the reality is that for the average poor kid, their chances of joining those ranks is not too much greater than their chances of becoming a professional ball player, or winning the lottery, and the ball player will make more money than the engineer, and the lottery ticket only costs a dollar.
As you point out, these kids do not lack mathematical ability 😉
Their pragmatism stands in sharp contrast to that of their wealthier brothers, who take on huge debts in order to obtain a ticket stamp that at best, will provide them an income which purchases less than the same job bought for their fathers, who did not have the debt. And increasingly, that good job they spent all that money to get will be outsourced or paycutted, leaving them not much better off than the guy from the hood who went directly into food service, and not quite as well off as the immigrant who learned bricklaying really fast instead of staying in school and trying to go to college, since he, too, had math skills and solid reality contact.
About a year or so ago, a very mainstream, conservative business magazine noted that the current generation of Americans will be the first who will be poorer than their parents.
Exactly right. Though there are anecdotal exceptions, it is very difficult for someone raised in a low income family to rise substantially above that level…everything is stacked against him. The biggest predictor of future standard of living and income is your parent’s income.