American colleges vary vastly in the wealth and resources they command and how much they use them to advance students’ prospects, say Barrett J. Taylor and Brendan Cantwell.
In fact, the American college landscape is starkly stratified, they write in Unequal Higher Education: Wealth, Status, and Student Opportunity (Rutgers University Press). Even as many high-school graduates consider college a near necessity if they are to attain the American dream, a growing gap between wealthy and impoverished institutions means that “few have the opportunity to attend a good-value institution,” the authors write.
“Millions of students find themselves in a circumstance where there are few good choices to make,” they say, when it comes to picking a college.
Taylor, an associate professor of higher education at the University of North Texas, and Cantwell, an associate professor of higher, adult, and lifelong education at Michigan State University, trace the long history and current dynamics of inequality in postsecondary education to make the case that, in a time of weakened state support for higher education, a few elite institutions increasingly win the competition to marshal donations, research grants, and other funds to offset the costs that their students bear. Meanwhile, huge numbers of struggling “institutions on a financial precipice” spiral downward.
With the gap widening, the authors write, even while access — the possibility of attending a college — is expanding, opportunity — the “prospect of securing a good-value seat” — is dropping.
Worse, they say, the growing institutional inequality that results from “policy choices and cultural practices” inordinately affects the traditionally underserved low-income and minority students who are concentrated at the smallest-resource and lowest-status institutions, where students’ tuition dollars cover a higher percentage of education and related costs than do tuition dollars paid by students at elite colleges. The struggles of the financially strapped institutions, write Cantwell and Taylor, suppress “prospects of upward mobility,” as well as persistence and graduation rates. Meanwhile, levels of student indebtedness rise.
In that way, a long history of racial and other inequality in American higher education is persisting, they say.
Amid so sobering an analysis, do Cantwell and Taylor find any room for optimism?
In an interview, Cantwell dwells first on what’s going wrong. The system of American higher education is “steeply stratified,” and “drifting to more pronounced inequality.” The “spiral of vulnerability” that plagues the least-well-endowed institutions, he says, “imperils individual students.” And, Taylor agrees in a separate interview, students’ futures are in a sense “mortgaged” when they become deeply indebted after struggling to grasp the bewildering array of factors involved in finding a good educational fit.
Still, the two authors write, going to college reaps many benefits even for students served poorly by a “complex and competitive system that is fraught with inequality.” And, they add, sentiment to reduce the disparities seems to be growing: Research on higher-education inequality is increasing, as are public opposition to it and the political will to address it — expressed in, for example, calls for greatly expanding free-tuition policies.
Liberal and conservative political views differ sharply over who should meet the costs of higher education, and for whom. The authors suggest that true change will not come until higher-education and political-party leaders, as well as the public, all acknowledge that they have reinvigorated roles to play in making educational opportunity more equitable so as to benefit the whole of American society.
“If we’re going to have a social compact that higher education is good for the country and good for everybody,” Cantwell says, “we’re going to have to close that partisan divide.”
Peter Monaghan is a correspondent for The Chronicle.
