College and social class: the broken promise of America

Cross Currents, Spring, 2006 by John Raines, Charles Brian McAdams

Even worse, to speak of such realities as teachers seems to make us traitors to our own calling. For that calling is to be emissaries of the promise and the dream, to make out of our classrooms places where hope is fed and America's kids begin to dream their futures into reality. It is not just the wealthy that want us to keep the secret mostly locked in social privilege. The poor too, or perhaps the poor especially, want us to pretend, want us to help them keep their children believing and trying! This puts us as teachers who are aware of persisting class inequalities into a profound contradiction of conscience. We want and need to think of our work in one way; but a systematic analysis of how power, privilege and schooling are inter-structured and interact in our country suggests a very different story, and not a happy story.

But I am getting ahead of the argument. I need to return to statistics, and only after that come back to the moral dilemmas of being teachers.

If we are a nation vastly unequal in terms of social class, then what is the relationship of class origin to eventual educational attainments? In 1979 students from the wealthiest families were four times more likely to have a bachelor's degree by age 24 than poor students. By 1994, fifteen years later, the wealthiest students were ten times more likely to have a degree. (5) What happened in those fifteen years was a triple whammy. First, post-industrial jobs began paying less. Second, tuition and related costs at colleges and universities consistently outpaced inflation. Third, all during that time state and federal grants for college and university students not only paid less and less of the total costs but in fact declined more sharply precisely at those public institutions like Temple University where I work where some of the hard-working survivors of the class struggle are battling for their futures.

The federal Pell Grant awards (for low-income students) fell from covering eighty-four percent of costs in 1975/76 to only thirty-nine percent of costs in 2000. (6) The picture gets darker still. Even as the overall Pell grants in relation to costs were shrinking, more of those dollars were going to elite universities than to public institutions. According to the New York Times, "for every Pell dollar one of its students received in the 2000-2001 academic year ... the median college got 7 cents while Harvard got 98 cents. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology got $1.09 and Princeton got $1.42." (7) These three elite universities got between 15 and 20 times more Pell money per student than the median college and university. And these are elite institutions, already blessed with generous private endowments, which educate only 20 percent of our college graduates, with 80 percent graduating from public universities. In terms of federal dollars to support college and university students, the rich got richer and the rest got short-changed. Acknowledging upper class advantage, Harvard President Lawrence Summers recently pointed out that "only 10 percent of the students in elite higher education come from families in the lower half of the income distribution." In fact, three-quarters of Harvard's 1999 entering class came from families in the top one-quarter of income earners! (8)