What Colleges Must Do to Help Needy Students

[Southpaw Bookworm]

Some interesting ideas and proposals here:

America's student-aid system needs major reforms and new ideas. The debates surrounding the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965 have focused on a wide range of provisions but are confined to federal programs and have produced few radical proposals. In announcing last month a new Commission on the Future of Higher Education, the secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, recognized that access and affordability remain central issues for the whole higher-education system.

At a time when the financial payoffs of a college education have risen, widening the economic gulf between college graduates and others, many qualified young people are not going to college because of lack of money and fear of debt. Neither grants nor median family incomes have kept up with the rapid escalation of tuition at four-year colleges over the past 25 years. More than half of all undergraduates in America today get some form of financial aid: grants and scholarships, student loans, and work-study jobs. Yet unmet need -- the gap between a student's resources plus aid and the cost of college -- is generally greater for lower-income students, even though they tend to go to less-expensive colleges.

Of course, college access does not depend just on financial aid. Extreme inequalities in family circumstances and the entire school system -- the fact that poor children usually get the poorest education -- are crucial factors. And, at highly selective colleges, the academic and test-score barriers to admission are more formidable than financial ones.

That does not excuse, however, regressive trends in financial aid. State governments and private colleges alike have been spending more and more on merit scholarships not based on need. Most aid is still need based, but in a climate of bargaining and competition, private colleges often sweeten their aid offers to favor "strong" or "desirable" applicants rather than the neediest. That has made some experts fear that the will to provide wide access to college through aid -- indeed, the very concept of need-based aid -- is in mortal danger. The fear is compounded by estimates that a growing proportion of the traditional college-age population of 18-to-24-year-olds will be from lower-income families, many of them Hispanic.

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i07/07b00701.htm