|
August 23, 2002
Edited by Donald E. Heller and
Patricia Marin
We are in the midst of a destructive set of federal,
state, and local changes in higher education policy that limit the
ability of minority and low-income families to go to college, damage
their future and the future of their communities, and sacrifice
too much of the human potential of a society where soon half of
all school age children will be non-white. In our society, individuals
and families who have not benefited from attending postsecondary
education are far less successful financially, earning less in real
terms than they did a generation ago. More than ever before, social
and occupational mobility is related to higher education. Therefore,
our goal must be to develop policies and programs that increase
access to those students who have been overlooked in the past.
During the 1960s and 1970s there were various attempts
to do just that. We kept tuition prices down, greatly raised financial
aid for poor families, created the work study program, and developed
affirmative action plans to increase minority enrollment. Gaps narrowed
and minority college going increased.
Since that era, however, we have witnessed a significant
reversal of access to higher education for minority and low-income
students. Now we have high and rapidly rising tuitions, affirmative
action has been banned in some of our largest states, institutions
have increased their entrance requirements, and gaps in college
participation are growing by both race and income. National studies
have disclosed huge gaps of unmet financial need for low-income
students.
Imagine someone reacting to higher education's current
situation by saying that what we needed were large new programs
to subsidize white and middle- to upper-income students to attend
college, and that it was not necessary to raise need-based aid even
enough to cover new tuition increases. We would give some minority
students entering awards because of their relatively high grade
point averages from inferior segregated schools. However, we will
take their aid away when they cannot get a "B" average
in a vastly more competitive college setting and blame them for
not being up to the task. A huge amount of money would go into this
new program, far more than was spent for the need-based scholarships
in some states. We would get the money from an extremely regressive
tax-a state lottery that drew money disproportionately from poor
and minority players. In other words, poor blacks and Latinos would
end up paying a substantial part of the cost of educating more affluent
white students, who would have gone to college even if they had
not had the additional financial incentive. And to add insult to
injury, colleges would cut their own financial aid funds, or shift
these resources to give more money to high scoring students. In
cases where the financial aid made more students eager to go to
a particular institution in the state, rather than an out-of-state
school where they would have to pay tuition, the in-state institution
could raise its selectivity ratings by excluding students with lower
scores, students who would usually be minority and from less affluent
families.
A policy such as this would make no educational sense.
Yet this type of policy is now in place in more than a dozen states.
Of course, no one intended to skew financial aid in these ways,
but the broad-based merit aid scholarship programs states have adopted
have produced these results. Although these programs stem from very
popular, good ideas-rewarding the "best" students and
keeping them in their state-their ultimate effects are of huge concern
to those interested in the civil rights of underrepresented students.
Genuine access to higher education for poor and minority students
is as basic to civil rights today as access to high school was a
half century ago.
There are a series of basic reasons why these programs
are not only unable to address serious education issues but are
also making the inequities in college participation worse. First,
the primary purpose of financial aid is to make certain that we
do not decide access to college on the basis of family income and
wealth. In a society where all the growth of income goes to those
with education beyond high school and equal access to education
is the only tool we have for making things fair, we have to make
college possible for all who can benefit. Otherwise, we may lock
in inequality from generation to generation and perpetuate the kinds
of deeply rooted class structures that have troubled older societies.
In our society, of course, these structures would tend to perpetuate
racial inequality as well.
A second reason for need-based rather than strictly
merit-based financial aid is that the students with the highest
scores and grades are usually from better-off families and are most
likely to go to college without any aid. Furthermore, the "neutral"
measures of merit are actually very strongly related to unequal
family background. For example, the high SAT scores received by
a student with college-educated parents, with lots of books and
educational materials at home, who has gone to very good schools,
who has had the best teachers, peer groups of similarly educated
students, and enriching summer experiences, is not simply a measure
of aptitude or native ability but is, to a considerable extent,
a measure of and the result of privilege. In fact, of all measures,
race and social class show the strongest correlation with SAT scores
and high school grade point average, with students from poorer and
minority families scoring lower on both measures. This test (which
is used in some states to award merit scholarships) does measure
significant differences, of course, but it has been repeatedly shown
to be at best mildly predictive of first-year grades in college
and has been shown to have little validity in predicting longer-term
academic success.
Yet another reason why the role of family resources
and financial aid in promoting college access needs to be looked
at very closely is that tuition costs have risen more rapidly than
family income virtually every year for more than two decades and,
during this period, the incomes of families have become far more
unequal. This means that more and more families simply cannot afford
to send their children to college without aid. The recent report
of the federal Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance,
Empty Promises: The Myth of College Access in America, concludes
that there is a gap of several thousand dollars between the aid
that is available to needy students and the cost of college. Millions
of families, including most of the nation's minority families, have
virtually no savings or net worth (such as equity in a home) to
draw against to pay for college. Too many students are forced into
impossible situations, such as working full-time, raising families,
and trying to go to college part-time, which greatly lessens their
chances to do well or ever graduate. Since many students have financial
motivations when choosing a college or deciding to drop out, affordability
issues become very critical.
College affordability becomes particularly serious
when tuition soars. Since the l970s, whenever there is a recession
the states have cut college funding and the public institutions
have responded with sharp increases in tuition to avoid sudden cutbacks
in services and programs. Because state budgets have to be balanced
every year and there has been very strong political pressure against
even temporary tax increases, there has just been an implicit decision
to tax the students by shifting to them and their families more
of the burden for paying for college. For the same reasons, there
has often been a failure to raise state need-based aid significantly
to even partially make up for the increase in tuition. The round
of double-digit tuition increases announced in many public colleges
and universities for the fall of 2002 shows this pattern in many
regions.
From a civil rights standpoint, shifting from need-based
to "merit" aid means shifting funds from blacks, Latinos,
and Native Americans to whites and Asians, from city and rural residents
to suburban residents, from children from one-parent families to
those who have two parents. These are clearly regressive changes
in social terms. We are in a time in which all families worry about
college costs and face costs that are higher relative to income
than the parents experienced as students. Most Americans are not
saving nearly enough to pay for their children's college costs.
Students worry about the debts they will face when they graduate.
Even though the real costs are still quite manageable for middle-class
families and the benefits of college education vastly outweigh the
costs, everyone is feeling squeezed. Every parent who has a child
who has worked hard in school and gets pretty good grades believes,
of course, that his or her child has "merit." In this
situation it is incredibly popular for a politician to promise to
help the worried middle-class families, the very families who vote
at the highest level, by recognizing and rewarding the merit of
their children. It is hard to imagine a more irresistibly popular
policy, particularly if there does not have to be a new tax to pay
for it. But as documented in this report, these programs often assist
not just middle-class families, but very wealthy families as well.
In this situation, those who get hurt are disorganized and politically
ineffective and do not understand the complexities of the system,
so the political costs are minimized.
In the current state of affairs, with large social
costs and deepening racial inequalities, it is extremely important
that political leaders, college officials and college faculties,
student organizations, and the press keep their eyes firmly on the
basic question-are we spending a rapidly growing share of our inadequate
student aid budgets to pay for programs that actually make college
opportunity even more unequal? We see that students from families
in the bottom fourth of the income distribution have less than one-eighth
the chance to get a B.A. than do those in the top quarter. In addition,
the more affluent students are thirty times more likely to get an
M.A. than are their poorer counterparts. Racial gaps in both college
participation and completion are huge. These differences threaten
the future of a society that is becoming more multiracial, more
unequal in income, and more dependent on education. In this situation
taking scarce funds to aid students who would go to college anyway
is indefensible and destructive. State leaders need to directly
confront these issues, as do federal legislators considering Pell
Grants, loans, and tax subsidies for affluent students and families
that shape opportunities for millions of students.
We hope that this report will bring the reality of
merit aid programs to the attention of state policymakers and others
involved in financial aid decisions. It is clear that many of the
goals of these programs, especially those that involve increasing
access to college, are not being met. Instead these programs are
increasing already existing inequities in higher education. As brought
to light by these studies, merit aid programs are, at best, not
meeting their promises. At their worst, they are locking an increasing
number of students out of college.
Gary
Orfield
Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Director, The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University
To view the COMPLETE REPORT
and study conducted by The Civil Rights Project go to:
Who Should We Help? The Negative
Social Consequences of Merit Aid Scholarships (in PDF and HTML
Formats)
|
