The Higher Education Act Just Turned 50. Has It Done What It Was Supposed To?

Fifty years ago Sunday, in a ceremony at his alma mater, Southwest Texas State College, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Higher Education Act of 1965 into law.

The signing was supposed to have taken place in front of Old Main, a building that the president had cleaned as an undergraduate janitor. But rain forced the event into a campus gymnasium.

The conditions didn’t dampen Mr. Johnson’s enthusiasm that day. He told attendees they were “witnessing a historic moment” when higher education would become available to everyone, regardless of family income.

“This legislation passed by this Congress will swing open a new door for the young people of America,” he said of the act, which expanded federal financial support to needy students and colleges. “It means that a high-school senior anywhere in this great land of ours can apply to any college or any university in any of the 50 states and not be turned away because his family is poor.”

Five decades, billions of dollars, and several reauthorizations later, it’s clear that the Higher Education Act has helped democratize American higher education. Since the act became law, the share of high-school graduates who go on to college has increased from roughly half to nearly two-thirds. In 1965 fewer than six million students were enrolled in public, private, or for-profit colleges; today more than 20 million are enrolled.

There’s no question that the bill has swung open the door for some low-income families. In 1970 only 46 percent of 18-to-24-year-old high-school graduates in the lowest-income quartile went on to college; today that figure is up to 62 percent, according to Census Bureau data compiled by the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education.

In that respect, the law has “fulfilled Johnson’s original vision for transforming America,” said David A. Bergeron, a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress who worked for 30 years at the Education Department.

“We have a lot to celebrate,” agreed Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “We’ve made huge strides in college access.”

Stubborn Disparities

Yet we’re still a long way from President Johnson’s vision of college for all. While more low-income and minority students are attending college today than 50 years ago, enrollment gaps between rich and poor and black and white persist.

Low-income students and some minority students continue to lag on college completion, too. In 1970 a student from a family in the highest income bracket was six times as likely as a peer from the lowest income bracket to obtain a bachelor’s degree by age 24, according to the Pell Institute. These days the gap has widened; the high-income student is now eight times as likely to earn that degree.

The data on race are less comprehensive, but research by the National Center for Education Statistics has found wide disparities. A study of students who were sophomores in 2002 found that only 20 percent of African-American students and 19 percent of Hispanic students had earned bachelor’s degrees or higher by 2012. White and Asian students in the study were more than twice as likely to have earned such degrees.

How to explain those gaps? Some advocates blame elementary and secondary schools, which have struggled to prepare an increasingly diverse student body for college. Others cite Congress, saying lawmakers have underfunded the student-aid and college-preparatory programs that the Higher Education Act created. While spending on Pell Grants and other programs has increased drastically since 1965, the money hasn’t kept pace with rising college tuitions.

“If we had lived by the values articulated by President Johnson, we’d see college-going rates across the board at the 80-percent range you see for high-income families,” said Mr. Bergeron.

Mounting Debt

At the same time, state spending cuts have shifted more of the responsibility for paying for college onto students and families. In the mid-1960s, states and families covered roughly equal shares of the cost of college, with the federal government contributing a smaller amount. By 2012 families bore almost half the cost, with the state share declining to 39 percent and the federal contribution holding constant, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis provided by the Pell Institute.

That shift has forced more students to borrow, and it has driven a growing number into unmanageable debt. In the mid-'60s, many students could afford college by simply working during the summer. By 2013-14, the average borrower at a four-year public college graduated with $25,500 in debt, while the average borrower at a four-year private college graduated with $30,200, according to the latest Trends in Student Aid report from the College Board. Fourteen percent of borrowers were in default in the third quarter of 2014-15, the report said.

Major shifts have occurred in how students are learning, too, with implications for how student aid is awarded. In 1965 distance learning meant programs like Sunrise Semester, a television series produced in conjunction with New York University, and college courses broadcast over public television, said Russell Poulin, deputy director of policy and analysis for the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. Plato, the first computer-assisted instruction system, had just been developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Today a quarter of students take at least one course at a distance. One in eight takes all his or her courses remotely, according to Education Department data. The Higher Education Act has evolved over time to accommodate distance learning, making a wider range of programs eligible for student aid.

So has the Higher Education Act been a success? Undoubtedly. Has it lived up to President Johnson’s lofty rhetoric? Probably not. But that may not be as important as what the bill represents.

In signing the bill into law, President Johnson “established a federal responsibility … to reduce or eliminate the financial barriers to equal educational opportunity in higher education,” said Thomas R. Wolanin, a longtime congressional aide who had a hand in five reauthorizations of the act.

Fifty years later, he said, “this federal role is now quite firmly in place and, best I can tell, unchallenged across the political spectrum.”

Kelly Field is a senior reporter covering federal higher-education policy. Contact her at kelly.field@chronicle.com. Or follow her on Twitter @kfieldCHE.

Correction (11/10/2015, 3:58 p.m.): The timeline accompanying this article misstated one provision of the 1992 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. The provision denied federal student aid to colleges that offered more than half of their programs by telecommunications, not by correspondence. The timeline has been updated to reflect this correction.