Who is more likely to get scholarship aid from this country's 50 flagship universities? If you said the very well off, go to the top of the class! If you are poor, what possessed you to think you deserved to be educated?
At the same time the top 50 public universities increased grant aid to the lowest income students by 29% they increased grant aid to their wealthiest students by 186%.
This is not the first time - nor likely will it be the last - that I have pointed out that our universities are shifting aid money to the very well off (merit scholarships) and away from the very poor (need-based scholarships) in order to compete in the perverse rankings game exemplified by the U.S. News & World Report. Link.
A new report from the Educational Trust, Danette Gerald and Kati Haycock, Engines of Diminishing Equity in the Nation’s Premier Public Universities demonstrates the problem.
It finds that as scholarships are skewed toward the wealthy and as tuition is increased - based on false claims that the money will be spent on need-based scholarships - entry to a college education at the flagship public universities becomes less accessible to minority and poor students. In fact, these top universities are far whiter and wealthier than are most high schools and other colleges.
Here are some of the key findings:
Flagship universities often justify the size of their tuition increases, at least in part, by the need to provide financial aid to needy students. Yet more and more they aren’t spending that money on the low-income students for whom such aid is absolutely essential if they are to attend college, but on the high- income students who will help increase their rankings in college guides.
• In 2003, for example, the flagship universities, along with a group of other public research universities just like them, spent $257 million on financial aid for students from families that earn more than $100,000 per year - considerably more than the $171 million they spent on families at the other end of the economic spectrum who earned less than $20,000 per year.
• In just eight years, spending on aid for these highincome students increased by a whopping $207 million, up from only $50 million in 1995. At the same time, spending on students from families making $40,000 per year or less increased by only $75 million, from $384 to $460 million.
• Astonishingly, the average institutional grant aid to students from families earning over $100,000 annually - $3,823 -is actually higher than the average grant awarded to low or middle income students.
The net result of this reshuffling of aid dollars? To meet remaining costs after grant aid, low-income students and their families must come up - from family contributions, work and loans—with amounts the equivalent of 80 percent of their annual incomes. For those at the other end of the spectrum, families making more than $100,000 per year, the amount remaining constitutes a more reasonable 12 percent of their yearly incomes.
The study also finds that sufficient efforts are not being made to retain the Latino, Black, and poor students who do enter these institutions, and, as a result, they percentage who graduate is far lower than for other students.
The study includes charts which rank these 50 colleges on a number of standards. Overall, they show that most are doing less to make college accessible than they have done in the past. You will find far more failing and near failing grades for these universities than average grades and almost no A's.
They found that, from 1998 to 20003. aid for students from families earning under $20K has decreased 5%; for students whose families earned between $20K-60K, it decreased 5%; for those earning between $60K-100K aid increased about 0-3%; but for those whose families earned over $100,000 aid increased by 12%.
The study concludes with specific and reasonable recommendations for improving the matriculation and graduation rates of poor and minority students. They include outreach and recruiting, reallocating money, and focusing on quality education for minority and poverty schools.
bonus news
And in other education news, the GAO has a new report that is recommended reading, Capital Financing: Department Management Improvements Could Enhance Education's Loan Program for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
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