For more than 50 years unfettered access to a college education has been the stated goal of most higher-education policy. Everyone who wanted a college education, who had prepared themselves to earn the degree and had exhibited the discipline and stick-to-it-ness necessary to succeed deserved a chance. A person’s race or ethnicity or gender, his or her financial circumstances, political or religious beliefs, or physical incapacities could not be allowed to matter.
The term itself — access — reflected a deeply held belief that unfettered participation in the nation’s higher-education system required the elimination of those very real barriers that had historically limited participation to the advantaged few.
The first barriers to fall were products of racial and religious discrimination — outright legislated segregation in the one case and, in the other, a more subtle but no less discriminating set of quotas and understandings used to limit the educational participation of first Catholics and later Jews.
Through the 1950s the relatively meager supply of colleges and universities represented a second major barrier to full educational participation in the United States. We tend to forget just how limited the supply of college places was in the decade following World War II. So complete has been the integration of community colleges into the nation’s higher-education system we tend to forget as well that almost all of those institutions didn’t exist 50 years ago — and none were the kind of mega-institutions that Miami-Dade and Maricopa County Community Colleges have become. And back then the nation’s normal schools and colleges had not yet morphed into statewide systems of comprehensive universities.
What helped fuel this extraordinary expansion was the lowering of yet a third set of barriers — mostly psychological and cultural — that had once taught most Americans that “a college education is not for me — it’s for them.” Amidst the hurly-burly of today’s admission’s arms race it is important to remember that as late as 1950 Harvard College had just 1.3 applicants for each place in its freshman class.
The final barriers to be attacked were financial. Through the 1970s the growth of public systems of higher education and the rapid expansion of community colleges kept the price of a college education within the reach of most middle-class Americans. But prices were rising then as now, particularly at those institutions, both public and private with selective admissions. At the institutional level private colleges and universities, in particular, began practicing what would come to be known as need-blind admissions by backing up their offers of admission with financial aid awards to students whose families could not pay the full freight of sending a son or daughter to the college of their choice. On the federal level a Nixon administration not remembered for its social conscience introduced a series of federal programs providing grants directly to students allowing them to attend the institution of their choice. From that beginning grew federal student aid with its Pell Grants and Stafford loans that today dispense more than $100-billion annually in the name of providing access to a college education to every American regardless of personal financial circumstances.
Let me finally note the story in today’s online Chronicle summarizing the Department of Education’s just released study, “The Condition of Education 2008.” The first change in the demographics of higher education that The Chronicle’s writer noted was that “women and minority students accounted for a large proportion of enrollment growth at colleges and universities in the decade leading up to the 2005-6 academic year.”
It’s not access or barriers, per se, that should concern us now, but the larger question of whether substantially greater access has produced educational equity.
More on Tuesday.
