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October 14, 2004
Edited by Donald E. Heller and
Patricia Marin
Foreword by Gary
Orfield
A central dream of American parents is sending their
kids to college. What used to be unusual has now become a necessity
if young people are to have a secure life in the middle class in
a post-industrial economy. As such, one basic goal of higher education
policy should be to make certain that this opportunity is not foreclosed
by a family’s income or wealth. In a society where 40 percent
of students are non-White, it is more important than ever to be
sure that minority students can go to college. In a society that
does not believe in welfare or social supports, and where fairness
rests on supposedly equal access to the education needed for economic
success, these should be basic principles. In a society where the
cost of college is soaring, affordability is a basic dimension of
fairness. Unfortunately, it is being lost in too many state policy
changes.
Many of our states have been cutting the share of state income
going to college education and allocating a larger share of it to
relatively new but very rapidly growing programs of “merit”
aid. At the same time there has been a huge expansion of federal
aid to middle class families and students, mostly in the form of
loan subsidies and tax subsidies, which are now far larger than
federal aid provided to poor students. In contrast to the period
of the l970s, when public four-year college tuitions were low and
aid for poor students to go to college was rapidly rising, we have
seen a quarter century of tuitions rising much faster than family
incomes, family incomes becoming more unequal, huge disparities
of wealth and savings by class and race, and a dramatic shrinkage
in the proportion of college costs funded by need-based student
aid.
In this situation it is surprising that states with relatively
weak and unusually expensive public higher education, with severe
problems of access for minority students (who are driving the nation’s
population growth), would choose not to fund access but to provide
aid to students extremely likely to go to college without aid—students
who have little or no financial need—while not covering access
for low income students. Rapidly accumulating research on merit
aid programs shows that this is what is happening in most state
“merit aid” policies. Since this policy began with the
Georgia HOPE Scholarship, there has been a lot of experience and
a growing body of analysis. The authors in this report are at the
forefront of that work, accounting for a great deal of the serious
research showing the racial and ethnic consequences of these policies.
This research, as well as the projected impact of
the Massachusetts policies (as shown in Chapter 2), suggests that
funding the Adams scholarships in Massachusetts would be a decision
to disproportionately aid affluent White students, with little scholarship
money available for the state’s African American and Latino
young people or for students living in poverty. In a state that
is resegregating in highly unequal schools, has clear discrimination
in its housing markets, has been raising barriers of tests for high
school exit and college entry, loses a large share of its minority
students before high school graduation, and refuses to adequately
fund voluntary transfer policies for students wanting access to
suburban schools with good college prep curricula, this use of college
subsidies adds to existing racial inequality.
As a teacher of very high achieving students, I would certainly
be in favor of giving high achieving students grants if the other,
more basic, requirement of assuring that the state’s public
higher education not be reserved for families with money had been
met first. It has not. In these circumstances I believe that the
leaders of higher education should strongly object to a policy that
uses public funds in a way that intensifies already serious inequality.
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:
State Merit Scholarship
Programs and Racial Inequality (in PDF and HTML Formats)
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