September 11, 2006

Needy Students' Access to Top Colleges Depends on the Pipeline, Not Just the Aid Budget

“The Politics of Inclusion: Higher Education at a Crossroads,” a conference being held this week at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is meant, in part, to be an opportunity for elite colleges, public and private, to compare notes on recently instituted financial-aid programs on their campuses to attract and enroll low-income students.

But if there was any unifying theme today, the conference’s first full day, it was that scholarship programs alone are not enough to increase access to the country’s top colleges (The Chronicle, May 12), even if a few of those institutions have succeeded in balancing access with prestige (The Chronicle, May 12). Instead, speaker after speaker returned to the idea that improving elementary and secondary education, as well as raising the college aspirations of low-income and minority students, is necessary to expand the pipeline to higher education, as reported last spring in a special report from The Chronicle on “School & College.”

In the day’s first panel, Walter Allen, a professor of higher education at the University of California at Los Angeles, highlighted the “extreme disparity” faced by black students at poorly performing urban high schools, compared with their suburban counterparts. (By contrast, another panelist, Jerome A. Lucido, vice provost for enrollment policy and management at the University of Southern California, talked about the practice in upper-middle-class communities of parents’ “redshirting” their kindergarteners—holding 5-year-olds back a year to give them a competitive edge.) Of the lower-income youths, Mr. Allen said, “they’re essentally victims of separate but unequal opportunity, separate but unequal schools.”

Marta Tienda, a professor of demographic studies at Princeton University, argued that it is important to emphasize going to college early on. If educators don’t catch students before high school, she said, the “die already is cast.” And James H. Johnson Jr., a professor of management at the University of North Carolina, speaking during an afternoon session, wondered aloud what responsibility higher education has to public schools. “We have to be in the business of working with K-12 education because, otherwise, those kids don’t have a shot” at going to college, Mr. Johnson said of low-income students.

Previous: Public Colleges Discount Their Tuitions as Well, Report Says
Next: Harvard U. to Eliminate Its Early-Admission Program