From the Left

/

Politics

Income-based diversity push falls short at elite colleges

By Clarence Page, Tribune Media Services on

A few years ago, Harvard University startled the academic world and many of the rest of us by offering what many would call a form of class-based affirmative action.

Esentially, the elite university offered a free college education to high-achieving students whose families earned less than $40,000 a year. Other elite schools, including Yale, Princeton and Stanford, have made similar offers in various ways, and Harvard, among others, has since raised the bar to family income of $60,000 a year.

How has it worked out? Unfortunately, not as well as many had hoped.

One study of the Harvard initiative's first year found that the number of students whose family income fell below the threshold increased by only about 15 students in a class of about 1,650 freshmen.

University officials at Harvard and other colleges with similar offers lament that there simply is not a large enough pool of high-achieving low-income students and that there's not much colleges can do to change that.

But that widespread belief is disputed by a new study by economists Caroline Hoxby at Stanford University and Christopher Avery at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

 

They looked at the 236 colleges and universities that are viewed as "most competitive" in Barron's Profiles of American Colleges and at high school seniors whose grades were in the top 4 percent nationwide and whose college aptitude test scores were the top 10 percent of test-takers.

The analysis published in December finds a surprisingly abundant supply of high-achieving low-income students who are not applying to selective colleges, Hoxby and Avery wrote, even though "selective institutions would often cost them less, owing to generous financial aid, than the resource-poor two-year and non-selective four-year institutions to which they actually apply."

And in case you were wondering, the low-income high achievers who do apply to selective institutions are admitted and graduate at high rates, the study points out.

Why are low-income students and their families passing up these opportunities? More than anything else, Hoxby and Avery conclude, the students simply don't know what they're missing. They don't know because nobody is telling them.

...continued

swipe to next page

(c) 2013 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

Comics

John Deering Joey Weatherford Michael Ramirez Marshall Ramsey Randy Enos Adam Zyglis