Education: Affordable and Accessible Only for the Privileged?
A 2007 Boston Globe report on college admissions data that has been making the rounds on Twitter lately reveals that “about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America's highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions' minimum admissions standards,” most of whom “are students who gained admission through their ties to people the institution wanted to keep happy, with alumni, donors, faculty members, administrators and politicians topping the list.”
Catch that? If your parents are already tied to the school, it doesn’t matter if you don’t meet the requirements, you can still get in. It’s affirmative action for the privileged.
The Globe article also points out that:
Colleges with more than $500 million in their endowments…served disproportionately few students from families with incomes low enough to qualify for federal Pell Grants. A separate study of flagship state universities conducted by the Education Trust found that those universities' enrollments of Pell Grant recipients had been shrinking, even as the number of students qualifying for such grants had gone up.
Just 40 percent of the financial aid money being distributed by public colleges is going to students with documented financial need. Most such money is being used to offer merit-based scholarships or tuition discounts to potential recruits who can enhance a college's reputation, or appear likely to cover the rest of their tuition tab and to donate down the road.
Meanwhile, students from lower- and middle-income families are struggling to pay student loans or simply choosing not to attend college at all. Many students choose to attend less prestigious schools simply to avoid the rising cost of tuition and debt-service that comes with higher-ranked schools. But that decision also comes at a cost: workers’ salaries are tied to their alma mater's prestige .
The Globe article points out that the children of the wealthy are much more likely to attend more prestigious schools than lower-income students, and a 2011 survey by Inside Higher Ed found that schools have an admitted preference for students from higher-income families, with some institutions admitting that the wealthier students that they are accepting "have lower grades and test scores than do other admitted applicants.”
All of this just makes Mitt Romney’s positions on student debt , college costs and access and inequality so much more despicable. The game should not be rigged—education should be accessible and affordable to all students, no matter who their families are.
