On Thursday of this week, K-12 educators will commemorate the 58th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision recognizing that separate schools for black and white are inherently unequal. Even after de jure segregation was officially dismantled, K-12 educators acknowledged that de-facto racial, ethnic, and economic segregation of schools is harmful to student outcomes. Low-income students stuck in high-poverty elementary schools, for example, are two years behind low-income students who have the opportunity to attend more-affluent schools.
At the elementary and secondary level, educators devised a number of strategies to address economic and racial isolation, including programs to allow low-income students to transfer out of high-poverty schools into higher performing middle-class schools, and “magnet” programs to attract middle-class students into higher-poverty schools with special themes or pedagogical approaches Both sets of strategies are employed in a fairly small number of communities nationally, but where they are implemented, they are associated with superior outcomes for students.
On the 58th anniversary of Brown, it is troubling to recognize that higher-education officials are even further behind K-12 policymakers in taking steps to integrate student bodies. While elite four-year colleges have instituted programs to recruit and admit additional black and Latino students, there is little that is being done to attract low-income students. And there are few “magnet” programs being instituted at racially and economically isolated community colleges to attract more middle-class students.
On one level, it is understandable that higher education would be late in addressing economic and racial stratification; whereas primary and secondary schools have long educated a broad cross-section of the American public, the entire higher-education sector was fairly elite until recently. In the early 1950s, around the time Brown was decided, only 14.5 percent of the adult population had even one year of college education, so issues of stratification between higher-education institutions and sectors were not particularly salient. Today, however, stratification issues loom much larger, as more than half (53.9 percent) of Americans age 25 years or older have at least one year of college, almost four times the share as in the early 1950s. Wealthy students outnumber low-income students at selective four-year colleges by 14 to 1, but at community colleges, low-income students outnumber students from high-socioeconomic-status families by nearly 2 to 1. Blacks and Hispanics account for almost three times the share of students at community colleges as they do at selective four-year institutions.
This level of stratification is troubling, because a growing body of evidence suggests that controlling for economic status, race, and academic ability, a given student is much more likely to receive a four-year degree if she starts at a four-year institution than a two-year institution. Just as it is a disadvantage to attend an economically isolated elementary or secondary school, there is evidence that attending a demographically isolated community college imposes a penalty on students. As we commemorate the anniversary of Brown, the broadening access to higher education suggests we need to think anew about applying Brown’s meaning to colleges and universities.