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BOOK EXCERPT
"Declining by Degrees"
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From "WORLDS APART: DISCONNECTS BETWEEN STUDENTS AND THEIR COLLEGES"
by Arthur Levine
... Forty years ago, the federal government and the higher education community made a commitment to the twin policies of universal access to college and choice among institutions of higher education for all qualified Americans. The goal was to ensure that income, gender, race, religion, and geography were not bars to college attendance or a student's ability to attend the most appropriate college. Today that promise is fading.
One of the reasons for this unfortunate change is that the price of college is rising far more quickly than family incomes in the United States and financial aid is not keeping pace. During the 1980s and 1990s, college tuition rose at more than twice the rate of inflation but family income increased only 27 percent. This means a higher proportion of family income is required to pay for a college education than in the past, and the burden falls largely on low-income families and to a lesser degree on middle-class families. In 2001-2002, college tuition represented an alarming 60 percent of a low-income family's paycheck versus 42 percent thirty years earlier. For middle-income families, the comparable figures were 16 percent in 2001-2002 and 13 percent in 1970-1971. And for high-income families, the numbers actually dropped from 6 to 5 percent.
College attendance rates match these numbers. Eighty-six percent of those from families with incomes in the top quartile attend some form of postsecondary education versus 57 percent from the bottom quartile. Adding academic ability into the equation, a student from the highest income quartile and the lowest aptitude quartile is as likely to attend college as a student from the lowest income quartile and the highest aptitude quartile. What does this mean? That the least able affluent children have as good a chance of attending college as the poor kids with the highest marks. ...
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MEET ADRIANA, JASON, MATT & BRITNEY
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