Candidates Grapple With How to Expand Access to College

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By SARA HEBEL

Never before has a college degree been more essential to an individual's prosperity in the United States. Nor have colleges ever been asked to play a more crucial part in preparing citizens for a global economy.

Yet finding a way to erase persisting inequities in who earns a college degree has proved difficult. With a new generation that is more financially needy and more diverse knocking on colleges' doors,access to higher education will be an important issue in 2008 presidential race.

The candidates have offered broad proposals that are meant to appeal to middle-income and working-class voters of all races who are worried about rising tuition prices as they struggle to make ends meet.

Many of the Democratic candidates have proposed programs to broaden access and improve the academic preparation of low-income students. By age 24, only 10 percent of students from the lowest socioeconomic quartile have earned bachelor's degrees, compared with 71 percent from those in the top quartile, according to the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education.

The national debate over immigration has prompted a different discussion about college opportunity, particularly among Republican candidates. They differ over how much public aid to provide high-school graduates who are illegal immigrants and want to attend college.

College for All?

John Edwards, a Democratic former senator from North Carolina, is among the most aggressive presidential candidates in seeking to ease voters' economic anxieties by promoting greater access to education. Among his proposals is "College for Everyone," a

program he has already put in place on a smaller scale in North Carolina.

Under the plan, which he also pitched in the 2004 presidential campaign, Mr. Edwards would use federal funds to pay for one year of public-college tuition and fees, as well as the cost of books, for students who take a college-preparatory curriculum in high school, work part time in college, and stay out of trouble.

"As the first in my family to go to college, I know that our system of public education should be our sturdiest ladder of opportunity," Mr. Edwards said in May as he reintroduced his college plan to voters.

Another Democrat, Christopher J. Dodd, a U.S. senator from Connecticut, wants to encourage more students to go to community colleges. Under his plan, the federal government would match each dollar a state spends to cover a portion of in-state tuition at public community colleges, with the goal of eliminating all tuition costs for students working toward an associate degree.

Other Democrats have offered proposals to help more students prepare and plan for college. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a U.S. senator from New York and the front-runner among Democrats in polls, has suggested doubling federal support for college-advising programs such as Gear Up, which focuses on helping financially needy middle-school students.

Barack Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois, has introduced legislation to allow high-school students who do not have access to Advanced Placement or other college-level courses to apply for federal need-based aid to attend classes for credit at community colleges.

Robert M. Shireman, director of the Institute for College Access and Success, a California-based nonprofit group, wants to see even-more-comprehensive proposals from the candidates. The country, he says, needs a leader who can guide discussions about how to lessen the ways that income dictates college choices.

Students from lower-income families are more likely than their wealthier peers to attend community colleges and less likely to enroll at elite, private colleges, he says: "That kind of stratification is not good for the nation."

Clashes Over Immigrants

None of the Republican candidates have announced major proposals to increase the number of Americans going to college, although they have said plenty about access for one group: illegal immigrants.

Some of the Republican candidates seek to tap into tensions that accompany demographic shifts in many cities and rural areas by staking out a tough stance on immigration. Their positions include opposition to letting some illegal immigrants pay lower, in-state tuition at public colleges, as some states allow.

Mitt Romney has been reminding voters that as governor of Massachusetts, he vetoed legislation that would have allowed some illegal immigrants who graduated from the state's high schools to pay in-state rates. Tom Tancredo, a congressman from Colorado, wants the federal government to prohibit states from granting in-state tuition to any illegal immigrants unless the same rates are offered to all U.S. citizens.

Taking a different position, John McCain, a U.S. senator from Arizona, helped craft a compromise immigration-reform bill that died in Congress this year. It would have given states the clear power to charge in-state tuition to illegal immigrants and would have put some undocumented college students on a path to green cards. Sam Brownback, a Republican senator from Kansas, was a co-sponsor of the bill.

Advocates of the federal provisions, which could still be enacted in separate legislation, say they would transform the educational prospects of 715,000 immigrants who are in kindergarten through grade 12 and who would potentially qualify for the residency and tuition benefits the measure would allow.

Opponents don't want the government to give public aid to immigrants who broke the law by entering the country illegally. Kris W. Kobach, chairman of the Republican Party in Kansas and a lawyer who has challenged state laws providing in-state tuition to illegal immigrants, says he is pleased that the candidates are paying attention to details of U.S. immigration policy. One thing that politicians and voters on both sides of the issue seem to agree on is that the next president will have to deal with an overdue need for clarity and change in that system.