Table: Family Income and College Success
Selective colleges should consider giving preferences to low-income applicants to help level the playing field in admissions, William G. Bowen, a prominent higher-education researcher and former university president, urged in a speech last week.
Mr. Bowen, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, said that his recent analysis of admissions data from 19 selective colleges, both private and public, had left him convinced that neither increases in financial aid nor improvements in public schools would soon remedy the severe underrepresentation of economically disadvantaged students at such institutions.
“I am strongly in favor of doing whatever can be done to enhance college preparedness for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, but that will be a long and difficult process,” Mr. Bowen said in a lecture delivered at the University of Virginia.
However, he said, replacing “need blind” admissions policies with a policy of giving an edge to low-income applicants would “help some substantial number of deserving students almost immediately.”
He concluded his remarks by saying: “Allegiance to this country’s ideals requires that American higher education do more than it is doing at present to support the aspirations of high-achieving young people from modest backgrounds who want to be welcomed within the walls of what are still seen by many as ‘bastions of privilege.’”
Although other higher-education researchers have issued similar calls for selective colleges to give preferences to low-income applicants, Mr. Bowen is by far the most well-known leader in academe to urge action on this front.
Along with being a former president of Princeton University, Mr. Bowen is an author, with the former Harvard University president Derek Bok, of a landmark book on affirmative action, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton University Press, 1998).
The lecture he gave last week was the second of three that he is delivering to kick off the centennial celebration of the University of Virginia’s prestigious Curry School of Education. He said that he planned to use the material covered in the lectures in a forthcoming book on equity in higher education.
Mr. Bowen, a strong supporter of affirmative action for minority students, took pains to note that he did not see income-based admissions preferences as a substitute for giving explicit preferences to underrepresented minority students. If colleges were to replace minority preferences with a policy of giving all applicants from the poorest fourth of society the same edge as relatives of alumni, minority enrollments at the 19 colleges studied would drop by nearly half, to 7.1 percent from 13.4 percent, he said.
But, Mr. Bowen said, such a policy would cause the admissions chances of all low-income students, white or minority, to rise substantially, to 47 percent from 32 percent. And white students from the poorest fourth of society would see their chances of being admitted to one of the selective colleges rise by nearly 20 percentage points, from 30 percent to nearly 50 percent. The share of low-income students at the colleges studied would rise to about 17 percent from about 11 percent.
Such policies would clearly have dollar costs, Mr. Bowen said. The private colleges in the study would need to increase their spending on student aid by about 12 percent, assuming that they maintained their current financial-aid policies.
But, Mr. Bowen said, the average SAT scores of each college’s entering class would remain essentially unchanged.
“At least part of the explanation is that at present large numbers of high-testing students from low-income families are being turned down,” he said. “They are suffering the same fate as many other disappointed candidates with high test scores who are applying to these selective institutions.”
Tinkering at the Margins?
The 19 institutions covered by Mr. Bowen’s study consist of 5 private Ivy League universities (Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities, and the University of Pennsylvania), 4 leading state institutions (Pennsylvania State University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Virginia), and 10 selective, private liberal-arts colleges (Barnard, Bowdoin, Macalester, Middlebury, Oberlin, Pomona, Smith, Swarthmore, Wellesley, and Williams Colleges).
Because certain data from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign were missing, the institution was excluded in determining the hypothetical impact of preferences for low-income students.
Mr. Bowen examined 180,000 applications for the colleges’ classes that matriculated in 1995, and tracked which students were accepted and enrolled, and how the students subsequently fared in college.
Another leading researcher on class issues in higher education -- Anthony P. Carnevale, vice president for assessments, equity, and careers at the Educational Testing Service -- said Mr. Bowen’s analysis failed to fully account for the bias of selective institutions in favor of wealthy students, and ignored the underrepresentation of middle- and working-class students at such colleges.
In blaming the lower SAT scores of low-income students for their underrepresentation at selective colleges, Mr. Carnevale said, Mr. Bowen ignores the reality that many low-income students with SAT scores slightly lower than those accepted by selective colleges could succeed academically at those institutions.
Mr. Bowen’s analysis also failed to examine how rising tuition is putting access to selective colleges out of reach for many families, Mr. Carnevale said.
“He is an apologist for elite institutions,” Mr. Carnevale said. “He has always been that.”
Mr. Carnevale argued that Mr. Bowen’s analysis “doesn’t address the fundamental question, which is the extent to which higher education has become an institution that reproduces class and reproduces elites.” The basic question that Mr. Bowen seems to ask is “What can we do at the margins to make things a little better?” Mr. Carnevale said.
The Poor Perform
Mr. Bowen’s analysis of how income-based preferences would have affected low-income students was just part of the study. Among his other key findings:
- The SAT plays a big role in keeping low-income students out of selective colleges. Less than a third of all students from families in the poorest fourth of society took the test, compared with two-thirds of students in the top fourth. Among those who took the test, the wealth and education levels of a student’s parents clearly influenced how well he or she scored: Just over 7 percent of those from the poorest fourth of society, and just over 20 percent of those from the wealthiest fourth, scored above 1200. As long as their SAT scores were comparable, low-income students stood the same chance as their wealthier peers of being admitted.
- Students with parents who did not attend college accounted for just over 6 percent of enrollment at the colleges studied. Students who fit that description and also came from the poorest fourth of society accounted for about 3 percent of the colleges’ enrollment.
- In aggregate, low-income students generally fared nearly as well at selective colleges as their wealthier peers; about 84 percent of students from the poorest fourth of society graduated, compared with about 87 percent of other students.
But such aggregate figures mask big differences in how well private and public colleges serve poor students. At the private ones, there was just a one-percentage-point difference in the graduation rates of students from the bottom and top economic quartiles. Public universities reported a 12-point gap, with one possible explanation being that such institutions had fewer resources to provide low-income students with support.
- Among students with comparable SAT scores, recruited athletes were about 30 percentage points more likely to be admitted to one of the colleges studied. Underrepresented minority students were about 28 percentage points more likely to be admitted, and “legacy” applicants -- those with connections to alumni -- were about 20 percentage points more likely.
FAMILY INCOME AND COLLEGE SUCCESS
A study of 19 selective colleges shows that class influences college access, but has a small effect on academic success.
| Proportion of applicants likely to be admitted, by family income |
| Bottom quartile (less than $25,000) |  | 34% |
|
| Second quartile ($25,000 to $50,000) | 40% |
|
| Third quartile ($50,000 to $80,000) | 43% |
|
| Top quartile ($80,000 plus) | 43% |
|
|
| Proportion likely to be admitted, by parental education |
| No parent attended college | | 35% |
|
| At least one parent attended college | 42% |
|
|
| Proportion of students that graduated, by family income |
| Bottom quartile (less than $25,000) | | 84% |
|
| All others (more than $25,000) | 87% |
Note: Data from a study of applicants to 19 selective colleges in 1995. Most of the difference in admissions probability by income group is attributed to differences in SAT scores.
SOURCE: William G. Bowen
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 50, Issue 32, Page A26
