This article was made possible with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Going to college can change the course of someone’s life. And yet the American higher-education system waylays a lot of students. It is deeply stratified. And for many people, it remains out of reach entirely.
Some signs point to growing opportunity. Students in the lowest income bracket are more likely to enroll in college right out of high school than they used to be. That proportion has gone from a third to about half in the last 30 years. But income still has an enormous influence on whether someone goes to college — and whether that person graduates.
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This article was made possible with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Going to college can change the course of someone’s life. And yet the American higher-education system waylays a lot of students. It is deeply stratified. And for many people, it remains out of reach entirely.
Some signs point to growing opportunity. Students in the lowest income bracket are more likely to enroll in college right out of high school than they used to be. That proportion has gone from a third to about half in the last 30 years. But income still has an enormous influence on whether someone goes to college — and whether that person graduates.
Educators, policy makers, and funders have all started talking more about social mobility, but are they pulling the right levers? The “free college” movement doesn’t fully reckon with why going is unaffordable for many people. Lists of best practices to close achievement gaps don’t often include the simple communication and guidance that could make a difference. Attention to first-generation students misses the question of why the system doesn’t serve more working parents.
To explore how to lift more people’s prospects, The Chronicle brought together a campus leader, a public official, a researcher, and a college counselor: José Luis Cruz, executive vice chancellor and university provost at the City University of New York; Daniel J. Hurley, CEO of the Michigan Association of State Universities; Anthony Abraham Jack, an assistant professor of education at Harvard University and author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students; and Sara Urquidez, executive director of the Dallas-based Academic Success Program. We discussed structural inequalities, expectations of students and their motivation to enroll in college, and the kind of support they actually need.
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The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Sara Lipka: Some sectors of higher education and many institutions have always been committed to social mobility — for decades, centuries — even if they didn’t go around talking about it all the time. Now more campus leaders have made it a big talking point. When and how did that happen?
José Luis Cruz: The change really started, I would say, 10 or 15 years ago. We went through the access phase to the success phase to career development and positioning students for good lives. The City University of New York, interestingly enough, was founded by law in the 1960s to be a vehicle of upward mobility for the city’s historically underserved populations. So depending on the sector, depending on the populations served, it varies when social mobility started to become important.
Daniel J. Hurley: One of the reasons for the pendulum swing from access to completion is accountability. You can’t enroll students who may be at risk, and then not help them succeed. And if you look across regions of the country — especially the Midwest, the Northeast — this is also about economic competitiveness. States, state economies, the private sector are staring down pretty hard at colleges, saying, We need talent. And so for just pure economic purposes, we need to do a better job of promoting social mobility.
Anthony Abraham Jack: We’ve long been obsessed with mobility in this country, from the Horatio Alger myths to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” — all of those stories we tell ourselves, and we study within the social sciences. But when we talk about social mobility, we have to talk about race and poverty, not just inequality. Because if you think about it from a civil-rights perspective, it’s about equal opportunity, but also, who can benefit most once they get in the door? With the decline of unions and certain jobs, college became more of a route to a middle-class life.
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Lipka: One fact of the American higher-education system is stratification: wealthy, mostly white students concentrated in more-selective institutions with greater resources and higher graduation rates, and poorer, largely black and brown students in less-selective public and community colleges, as well as for-profits. How much do you see that changing in the next decade?
Cruz: I don’t see it changing that quickly. Our K-12 system continues to cluster our low-income students and students of color in schools where we spend less, teach less, expect less. So as we think about the levers to try to drive the higher-ed system as a whole in the right direction, we have to be mindful of our inability to have done that in the K-12 system.
Hurley: I agree it’s going to be way too slow. But colleges are going to be forced to think about dollars and cents, to mitigate stratification just based on demographics. Our populations are limited. We’ve done a pretty good job in Michigan of pilfering from Illinois, as every other state has with its neighbors. We often look to international students, but we have our challenges there. So we have to do a much better job of enrolling more students from all types of backgrounds. We’re focusing a lot on rural Michigan, another demographic that has been underenrolled.
Jack: In the K-12 system in America, there’s a $23-billion difference between predominantly white and predominantly nonwhite school districts. That is a pipeline problem. And it’s rooted in the history of exclusion that this country loves to forget about. A $23-billion difference, and yet we try experimental changes: What can $100,000 do here? What can a $1.2-million grant do there? This is a generational problem. It’s more than just who gets a laptop. It’s more than just who gets books and who doesn’t. We need an investment in teachers. An investment in principals. An investment in individuals rather than metal detectors and the like. Because who even sees college as an option? Who gets to go, and to which colleges?
We’re still living with the legacy of redlining, blockbusting, and the racism inherent in the GI Bill that leads to drastically unequal opportunities in the home that only get amplified in elementary, middle, and high school. We cannot talk about where higher education is going without talking about the systemic, structural inequalities in K-12 that begin with funding.
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Free-Tuition Programs
These programs, often known as promise programs, offer scholarships to high-school graduates who meet modest academic criteria to cover up to the full amount of tuition and fees at local two- and sometimes four-year colleges.
Hurley: You hear about free-tuition programs, and they sound great. But then you look at students’ academic preparedness, and right off the bat, that is a huge issue in terms of pipeline. Thirteen of the 15 state universities in Michigan participate in a scholarship program called the Detroit Promise. But the proportion of students from the Class of 2019 at all Detroit-area high schools who were eligible for the scholarship was just 10 percent.
Sara Urquidez: In Dallas County, we have a promise program that sends everyone to two-year colleges. And it’s targeting high schools along race, along socioeconomics. The program essentially takes the Pell Grant, gives it back to students, and calls it a scholarship. And that is coming at a significant opportunity cost, because the students could have used Pell Grants at institutions with more resources available to support them to graduation.
Lipka: Beyond stratification, or where students go to college, there’s the question of whether they go at all. What does it take to build those expectations, to build more of a college-going culture?
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Gates Roundtable – Sara Urquidez
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Urquidez: What I’ve seen in my work is that students perform at the level you set for them. We as educators and professionals have a responsibility to set the same expectations for our low-income students that we would have for our own children. And that’s one thing that I train my staff on: Every student that walks in the door, you should be concerned about providing the same opportunities that you would want for your child, your brother, your sister, etc. And we have to really believe that students can achieve.
I have put a lot of kids that didn’t have college-ready SAT scores into four-year colleges that had the resources to support them. And they’ve graduated on time. And they’ve gone on to get jobs, and are making more money than their families could have ever possibly imagined when they started high school. That expectation really just starts with the adults and the professionals in the room. You can use the community to build expectations, but you also have to understand that communities come with their own expectations for students.
Cruz: At CUNY, we have early-childhood programs run in conjunction with the city. We have an “explorers” program to ensure that middle-school students visit a campus. We are now trying to be more mindful of signaling to students in the 10th grade whether they’re on track to go straight into credit-bearing courses. We’re working with the city’s Department of Education to determine how to send that message — with a menu of options for how you can get on track if you’re not yet.
Hurley: Expectations are critical, but so are motivations. There’s been a debate for years on how we brand our institutions and why to go to college. Of course there’s, Make a million bucks more. It’s about the ROI, the education premium. But now we’re coordinating our first statewide enrollment-marketing campaign, and we did focus groups and polls with students whose parents did not have college degrees, and the parents, too. We asked them, Why do you want to go to college? Why do you want your kids to go to college? And money was not it. The overarching thing was to make an impact in an industry, in the community, in the world around us. So our campaign theme is, Make a difference.
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Gates Roundtable – Anthony Abraham Jack
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Jack: Reducing insecurity is also one of the biggest driving factors. The security that we have taught our students that a B.A. now brings, that a college degree now brings — it means something that they sometimes can’t even put into words. Because they see their parents, or their aunts and uncles, or whoever’s raising them working two or three jobs. Breaking their backs. Going out on disability. Lights going off. Not having a lot of the resources at home. All of that becomes wrapped up not necessarily in a paycheck, but the way in which they come together. It can be a motivating factor that you’re more secure than the previous generation was. But more importantly, you become the safety net for your family in a number of different ways.
That’s why I always tell people, students no longer come to college; families come to college. So why do we wait until the very end of the conversation to bring families in? We could actually bring them in on the front end.
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Gates Roundtable – José Luis Cruz
Cruz: It’s really a two-generation problem. On the one hand, we have to look in higher ed at the students that are coming and try to address some of the ways in which society has shortchanged their ability to meet their full potential. But on the other hand, we have to reach out to their families, specifically from an educational standpoint. So for example, at Lehman College, in the Bronx, we were very proud of the percentage of our students that were first-generation. And as president, I would question that, because it meant that we were really not doing a good job of educating their parents.
In the Bronx, there are 450,000 adults with high school and perhaps some college, but no degree. What that says to a college that’s situated in such a community is: You really have to step up your game in continuing education. You have to partner better with the unions to try to identify where there are opportunities for certificate programs that will take a mother from $18 an hour to $23 an hour, that will bring that mother to campus so that her kids see their mother in school.
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Lipka: As graduation rates are ticking up gradually but steadily over all, they’ve remained pretty stagnant for lower-income populations. Are we talking frankly enough about the reasons that these gaps persist?
Urquidez: I don’t think we are. We tend to oversimplify the conversation. And we will not see anything change until we start having frank conversations about affordability.
Lipka: And by affordability, you don’t mean “free college,” right?
Urquidez: Right.
Lipka: What’s missing when the focus is on the words “free college”?
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Urquidez: What’s missing is that tuition isn’t enough. As long as we continue to think that tuition is the barrier to affordability, the problem is not going to get better. That would take truly looking into the cost of college and understanding what it means for our most vulnerable students. We’re not willing to acknowledge the fact that these students just can’t close the gap. There is no capital available to them.
Last-Dollar Programs
The term “last dollar” means that scholarship funds are awarded after any federal or state grant aid, a policy that makes the programs less expensive to maintain. But many student advocates support first-dollar programs, because then the scholarship can cover educational expenses beyond tuition and fees.
The conversations about free college all have to do with tuition. And there are a lot of last-dollar programs. The problem with that is you still have room and board, books, living expenses, and the opportunity cost of not being able to work. Students will be successful if they have the resources to be able to focus on being students.
What I see is that students who go 45 minutes away have a higher likelihood of success, of graduation within four years. The number exponentially increases if we send them more than 70 miles away. That’s counter to what people have traditionally thought. They’ve thought, Leave students in their home communities. They’ll save money. They’ll be able to work. But suddenly they’re working 40 hours a week and helping subsidize the household. It becomes, Well, I’ll go back next semester, and I’ll go back next semester. And it never actually happens.
Jack: When we talk about free college, it’s almost as if all the activity is happening in the transaction between you and the bursar. These calculations forget that the price of actually being a person is what really keeps a lot of people out. And will “free college” address the fact that so much of student debt is through the for-profit sector?
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Play Now
Gates Roundtable – Daniel J. Hurley
Hurley: The interplay between this “free college” mantra and social mobility is interesting. When there’s no income cap, that is spectacularly irrational. Among the most fundamental principles of financial aid is it needs to go to the people that need it most — and to cover a lot more than just tuition, but the fuller aspects of the cost of attendance.
And these programs that are being floated — two words, “free college,” — and OK, I’ll vote for you — to me it’s just over-populist. And I don’t see them happening. I think most of the activity is going to be at the state level, the community level. But if there were a free-college program that had no income cap and no focused dollars at lower incomes, it would run in the hundreds of billions, if not higher. My god, I think that would do horrible things for social mobility.
Urquidez: In the Dallas County program, the students who are persisting and graduating are the high-income students. And they’re being subsidized because there is no income cap.
ASAP
The City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs has become a national model for supporting low-income students.
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Cruz: And if those dollars are put toward the students who need them the most, you will see dramatic gains in achievement. At CUNY, one of our most productive programs is ASAP. It has doubled on-time graduation rates for community-college students. It’s been replicated in several other states. And there are three things to it: Students get a book voucher, a MetroCard, and access to advising. So if you have x dollars available, do you put them toward last-dollar free-college efforts, or do you channel those dollars to where you can have the most impact?
Lipka: One thing about ASAP is that it’s expensive. And so in terms of institutional priorities, what are the trade-offs?
Cruz: The trade-offs are more for the state and the city. The program was launched through philanthropic support, piloted, and proven effective. And the city and state put in the dollars to scale it dramatically. We have about 25,000 students covered right now, and we’re piloting it at two four-year colleges in the system with funding from the Robin Hood Foundation. I’m making the case to the state, with data, that it is a good investment.
Lipka: What else do you see at institutions that are closing achievement gaps?
Cruz: It’s less about the best practices, because everybody does them. Undergraduate research, peer advising, supplemental instruction — you name it. It’s more about the better practitioners: relentless, very intentional, data-driven. And they’re getting different results.
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Eighty to 90 percent of budgets are people. So how can you organize the time, talent, and energy of your people to drive the results you need? We have all of these people whose job it is to serve students. So how do we support them to get that work done? When we look at institutions that are doing a fabulous job and ask, Why do you think you are outperforming these other places? They can’t tell you. Because they are doing the exact same things, just better.
Jack: We need to expand what our best practices are, because there’s a lot that we take for granted about what students actually know. After being in the system for years, for decades, people forget what our incoming students, especially the most vulnerable, at the beginning of their journey, don’t understand.
Money does help. But what are the social hurdles to taking advantage of — and benefiting from — the full range of resources? Who goes to mental-health services? Who gets their résumé looked at as a freshman versus as a senior? Who studies abroad?
Urquidez: I had a student who went off to the University of Southern California. She called in October (they always call in October). And she said, When was I supposed to learn how to write a 10-page paper? Everyone here knows how.
And so I walked her through it, but I thought, We have to do something different. So now we have a summer program to talk to students about how to use research libraries, how to access mental-health services, and health services in general. Most of our students will go to the doctor for the first time when they go to college.
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I wanted to host the program on a four-year campus because I think it’s important to actually show students the places we’re talking about. But when I pitched it to an admissions office, the people there said, Why on earth would we need to do that? That’s what orientation is for.
And I said, Well, orientation is dominated by parents. And we need to let students who don’t have super-involved parents really, truly understand certain things. But we could not find a four-year university that was willing to host us.
Jack: Many schools need to start from scratch with orientation. And they cannot overlook a faculty and staff orientation to discuss engaging with students. As in: How are you going to frame that first meeting? How are you going to frame office hours? In your first class, are you going to walk students to your office so they can see where it is? The University of Maryland-Baltimore County does some of that with its Meyerhoff Scholars Program, and other places have done really good work that should be more universal. It’s about building rapport with students. It’s saying, I want to walk you through this, and I want to see you here the next time I have office hours.
Lipka: Best practices are often interpreted as programs to add rather than patterns of communication to establish with your students. What other things aren’t talked about as much, or aren’t happening as much right now as they should be?
Hurley: We hear a lot about Georgia State, but it really is phenomenal what they’ve done. For not a wealthy institution, they invested huge sums of money and got a huge return. We need more examples of that. The Michigan College Access Network has a college-advising program that draws on federal, state, institutional, foundation, and K-12 money to train recent graduates to go into school districts with higher student-to-counselor ratios, like 700 to 1, and work with students. There’s huge ROI on that in terms of higher Fafsa completion rates and more college attendance.
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Mandatory Fafsa Completion
More school districts are requiring students to complete the application for federal student aid before they graduate from high school.
Urquidez: We need to talk about the growing trend of mandatory Fafsa completion. The problem is, filling out a Fafsa isn’t going to translate into college enrollment. For one thing, it doesn’t solve the affordability problem. And also, there’s still the verification process and how scary that is for students.
Verification Process
Each year, about one-third of applicants for federal student aid, generally poorer students, are asked by the government to submit additional information, like tax transcripts and other documents, to verify their eligibility.
No. 1 on my wish list is for any college to be able to see a student’s Fafsa when they apply, rather than the student having to send it to individual institutions. No. 2 is a centralized processing place where students would send verification documents. That way they could send the forms only once, and any college could pull them down. The verification process is such a significant hurdle.
Jack: I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about food and housing security. If it’s episodic, that means open your dining halls and residence halls over breaks. If it’s chronic, work with a food bank or pantry or with your school of social work to have students apply for benefits. We need our students to focus on their work, not on two of the most harrowing things: where they’re going to eat or sleep.
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I also want to push for removing the last-dollar clause from scholarship programs — Gates and the like — to make sure that students are fully funded as people. It just doesn’t make sense for a student who receives a fellowship worth more than $55,000 to be living in their car for a month or going hungry because that money only fills a gap. And I want to lobby to remove the tax on scholarships, which blindsides some students.
Cruz: One place that’s seldom discussed when we’re talking about student success is the classroom. We have one institution where, for many years, the pass rate in Chemistry 101 was 30 percent. Faculty would say, That’s just the way it is for the students we serve and the resources we have available. But along come a couple of new faculty members who flip the classroom and create an active learning environment. They study what works and what doesn’t. And within a couple of years, the pass rate is 80 percent. The skeptics say, Well, you lowered the standards. Well, no. We’re giving the same exams as a sister institution. As we think about the levers available to us, we’re focusing not only on wraparound services, but on our faculty and what they can do to get our students to learn and succeed.
This story is part of a series, Broken Ladder, examining the role of higher education in social mobility. It was made possible by a grant of $149,994 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has no role in our editorial decision-making.
Sara Lipka works to develop editorial products in different formats that connect deeply with our audience. Follow her on Twitter @chronsara, or email her at sara.lipka@chronicle.com.