A new study from Public Agenda has found that the main reason students drop out of college is that they have to work. That raises the question: Has the time come for an affirmative-action policy based on socioeconomic status?
And that raises a further question: Are the selective institutions that could provide enough financial aid to needy students, so they could work less, doing enough to recruit them? In other words, should the discussion of retention include a discussion of class and admissions? The Chronicle asked a group of scholars and experts what they thought.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation:
Three trends are likely to push the idea of affirmative action for low-income students to the forefront in the next couple of years.
First, the enormous underrepresentation of low-socioeconomic students at selective institutions, always an embarrassment to higher education, is getting worse. A 2004 Century Foundation study found that at the most selective 146 institutions, 74 percent of students come from the richest socioeconomic quarter of the population, and just 3 percent from the bottom quarter, a roughly 25:1 ratio. Research by The Chronicle and others suggests that in recent years, the stratification has grown even greater, putting pressure on universities to take action.
Second, increasing attacks on race-based affirmative action will very likely push universities to put in place class-based programs as an indirect and legally sound way of promoting racial diversity. A new challenge to racial preferences at the University of Texas at Austin, currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, could prevail in the Supreme Court, where the new swing justice, Anthony Kennedy, dissented in the 2003 University of Michigan case supporting racial preferences. Meanwhile, Ward Connerly has plans to bring anti-affirmative-action initiatives to Arizona and Missouri in 2010.
Third, we have a liberal African-American president who is uniquely positioned to ease the transition from race-based to class-based affirmative action, having said that his own daughters don’t deserve preferences in college admissions, and that low-income students of all races do. But if economically disadvantaged students are admitted to selective colleges through affirmative action, will they be able to graduate? With the right support programs, yes. As the new report from Public Agenda finds, students drop out not because they’re unprepared, but rather because they are stretched financially and have to work to make ends meet. A forthcoming Century Foundation report by Edward Fiske finds that a new program, the Carolina Covenant, has increased graduation rates by ensuring that financial aid and support programs are in place for low-income students. Likewise, research by William Bowen and colleagues finds that students are more likely to graduate at selective universities than less-selective ones—even though the standards are more demanding—perhaps because selective institutions have greater resources to support students.
All of which is to suggest that class-based affirmative action won’t lead unprepared low-income students to drop out. To the contrary, it should increase graduation rates—a central goal of the Obama administration.
Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP and a professor of history at the University of Virginia:
I think the time has long passed for adding socioeconomic status to the categories of affirmative action, but it must not and cannot be viewed as a replacement for race. Poverty is not a proxy for race, and to pretend that it is would eradicate the initial rationale for affirmative action—to correct for society’s demonstrable biases against people of color regardless of their socioeconomic status.
The murder some years ago of Bill Cosby’s son by a white racist who later bragged about the shooting to his friends shows how feeble the Cosbys’s great wealth was in protecting their son against this ugly virus. The recent news that black graduates of prestigious colleges and universities feel they must “whiten” their résumés to hide their blackness demonstrates how little effect affirmative action in its original iteration has today, and how our current substitution of “diversity” for actual race-based affirmative action has rendered the latter almost useless. How many of our colleges count students from Africa and elsewhere toward their “affirmative action” goals?
So bring on socioeconomic status. And while you’re at it, bring back race-based policies—you cannot get beyond race without going to race.
Walter Benn Michaels, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago:
Seventy-six percent of students from high-income families get bachelor’s degrees; the figure for students from low-income families is 10 percent. Why? Because the American educational system is set up from start (the property taxes that largely finance public schools) to finish (the SAT’s and AP’s that point students toward the Ivy League or toward the community college) to reproduce and legitimate the class structure of American society. So, on the one hand, it makes complete sense to support economic affirmative action (every little bit helps) while, on the other, it makes no sense whatsoever to think it could be put into effect in a way that would make a real difference. With race-based affirmative action, a little fine tuning—basically enrolling more black students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, which turns out to mean more middle-class immigrant blacks (in the most selective schools, they often make up more than a third of the black student body)—has been central to what success we’ve had. So the proportion of black freshmen at the Ivy League’s current affirmative-action leader (Columbia University) is 12.1 per cent, only a little lower than the black population nationwide. But if you’re going after poor people, recruiting kids from higher socioeconomic backgrounds is an obvious nonstarter. And, perhaps more to the point, if you somehow succeeded in making, say, the Columbia student body more socioeconomically representative (with something like half of the students coming from households earning under the American median—about $50,300), you would have made the place virtually unrecognizable. Which is not going to happen, and which is why economic affirmative action is likely to take its place alongside economic diversity as yet another substitute for economic equality.
George Leef, director of research at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy:
It’s nothing new to learn that some students are unable to balance their college work and a job to earn the money they need for tuition and expenses. This is probably increasing as colleges become increasingly expensive and enroll more students who are academically weak, disengaged, and have trouble managing time.
I’m not convinced this is much of a problem. After all, many Americans who graduate from college today find that the best employment they can obtain is in work that calls for no college preparation. If this is a problem, however, the solution is for schools that can’t retain these students to offer more counseling. That would include both academic counseling and pre-enrollment counseling that weaker students would be better off at a less costly school, where they wouldn’t need to work so many hours.
Colleges don’t want a high dropout rate, and those with such rates have tried hard to minimize the number of dropouts for decades—without notable success.
Addressing this supposed problem with “class-based affirmative action” (that is, admitting into selective schools students who otherwise wouldn’t qualify on academic grounds, but who come from relatively poor families) would seem, if anything, to exacerbate it. Students who struggle in college because they can’t handle the combination of course work and part-time employment will not have an easier time if they’re enrolled at a more-selective institution, where the work is usually more difficult and the costs greater.
Class-based affirmative action merely shuffles a small number of students from poorer families up into more-prestigious colleges, where they receive an education that isn’t necessarily any better than they’d have received elsewhere. It also shuffles an equal number of students down into “fall back” schools just because those students aren’t poor. This game of musical chairs accomplishes nothing.
Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University:
Everybody is rightly concerned with maintaining diversity on our campuses in many forms—geographic, international, racial, cultural and socioeconomic. That is not new in American higher education.
Clearly, we need to be sure that students from families with low and moderate incomes have access to the colleges of their choice, especially now. It is important for American society to maintain its dynamism through one of the proven avenues of economic opportunity. And it’s important for our colleges and universities to provide young people with the opportunity to learn from and with those different from themselves, since we know they will be part of a century defined by globalization and interdependence of different cultures.
One thing I’m concerned about is that we not be forced to make a false choice between admission policies that focus on wealth and class and those that seek to achieve greater diversity based on race and ethnicity. We want our colleges and universities to reflect many kinds of diversity, and we cannot assume that focusing on one will address the other. Indeed, multiple studies and painful experience have demonstrated that where affirmative-action programs have been dismantled at our great public universities, minority enrollment has fallen off sharply.
At the same time, during an era when income distribution has become increasingly unbalanced toward the wealthy, no one would deny that a more equitable society demands that young people from families of low and moderate incomes ought to be able to attend college as a step toward achieving their highest potential in life. We have tried to do that at Columbia, where we have been able to attract a highly diverse student population with both need-blind admissions and full-need financial aid for our undergraduate college and engineering school. In recent years, like a number of peer institutions, we have also expanded financial aid, replacing all need-based loans with grants and eliminating tuition and room and board for all families with incomes below $60,000.
So we have worked very hard to ensure that financial pressures are not the cause of students’ abandoning their education. This kind of commitment to financial aid is not easy for any institution to maintain in this economic environment. But I begin with the central proposition that true educational diversity is both economic and cultural—and we need policies in place that recognize as much.
Jamie P. Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation for Education:
This report from Public Agenda sheds new light on a persistent and pervasive problem. Simply put: When it comes to succeeding in college, low-income, minority, and other nontraditional students are far too often derailed by the pressures of “real life.”
Many of these students face a long and arduous road through college because family obligations and economic necessity compel them to work—often in full-time jobs. In fact, only 20 percent of those who begin college at two-year institutions graduate within three years. At four-year institutions, not much more than half of first-time students graduate even after six years.
It is vital that we as a nation do more to help these students succeed. First of all, the national work force is in growing need of highly skilled workers—workers who are properly prepared for the 21st-century global economy. We simply cannot afford to waste the potential that these students represent. Second, as college costs continue to rise, and as our nation continues to become more diverse, more and more students will face these real-life barriers to success. If we fail to find effective ways to address this issue very soon, America’s sagging college-completion rates could become far worse.
Clearly, federal and state governments should do more to craft policies that put more financial aid into the hands of students who need it most. Strategies proven to increase the success of at-risk students should be expanded and replicated—beginning with exemplary programs developed in institutions with the most experience at serving such students: the nation’s community colleges and minority-serving institutions. Employers should make it their responsibility to support workers’ educational goals, by providing child care, accommodating workers’ class schedules, offering tuition-reimbursement programs, and simply fostering an environment that encourages lifelong learning.
Yes, it will require significant effort to address this issue. But failing to address it is not an option.
Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity:
I’ll assume that the reasons given by the survey respondents are true. I’ll also assume that, if someone wants to go to college, it’s desirable that somehow the money be found for him or her to do so (but it’s better if the money is come by voluntarily rather than through taxation). Neither assumption is unassailable. It’s easier to blame outside forces than personal ones, and many would question the assumption that the more people who go to college, the better.
With those assumptions, however, if people are dropping out of college for financial reasons, that certainly would argue for better need-based aid for those admitted. It does not, however, argue for socioeconomic preferences in admissions.
As for racial preferences: The legal justification for them today is the supposed educational benefits that obtain from student-body diversity. Naturally, preferences based on race are a more efficient way of achieving racial diversity than are preferences based on socioeconomic status.
But I would much prefer that preferences be based on socioeconomic status rather than race. The educational benefits that supposedly flow from a diverse student body are rooted in differences in perspectives and experiences—not in skin color per se. Weighing socioeconomic status would provide such diversity to a similar degree as race, and without the ugliness, divisiveness, and myriad other costs of racial discrimination.
In a society that is increasingly multiethnic and multiracial, we simply cannot have a legal regime that sorts people according to skin color and what country their ancestors came from, and which treats some better and others worse based on which silly little box they have checked.
Final caveat, though: I doubt that the educational benefits of any sort of diversity can justify admitting students other than those most willing and able to do work at a high intellectual level.
