College and social class: the broken promise of America

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

This side of that future day of reckoning, there are important things we can do to increase access to and success in higher education in this country and thereby reduce the unfairness of how schooling gets done in America. I will confine my remarks to higher education, where the issues of access and success are less intractable. (But let us remember that the real "killing fields" of education are located earlier on).

We can begin with what looks like a promising state policy to increase class diversity in higher education, but is not. (15) Ten years ago the state of Georgia started the HOPE Scholarship program (Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally). At first glance it looked like an excellent tool to increase access to higher education across social class divisions. The state of Georgia provides full tuition scholarships for a four-year degree to all students who attain a "B" average in High School and maintain that level in college. The money comes from the state lottery, and the level of funding is pegged to the public university system but can be used as partial payment for more expensive in-state private colleges. Today, there are ten other states, mostly in the South, who offer HOPE-like tuition plans.

Unfortunately, what looked like a promising way to increase class diversity in higher education has had, in fact, the opposite effect. A recent study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University concluded that,

    while HOPE appears to have produced an overall increase in college
    attendance among Georgia youth, this increase was not shared equally
    among all Georgians. Higher-income youths were far more likely to
    increase their schooling after the introduction of HOPE than those
    from lower income families. Using comparisons with other Southern
    state[s], we see that HOPE increased enrollment for youth from
    families with incomes above $50,000 by 11.4 percentage points. By
    contrast, the program appears to have had no effect at all on the
    enrollments for Georgia youth from lower-income families. (16)

The basic problem is two-fold. HOPE is merit-based, not need-based, and in fact served to dry up need-based scholarship programs. And second, HOPE does nothing to address the class-based discrepancies in the quality of elementary and secondary school education. Instead of "leveling the field" of access, students from low-income families never got onto the field in the first place. Moreover, because the funding for HOPE comes from the notoriously regressive "hidden taxation" of the lottery, it means that poor people's money is being transferred to the kids from better off families, and thus further cements in the advantages of social class.

If HOPE-like programs do not provide real hope, what is the way forward to increase access to higher education amongst those now so systematically excluded? The answer is both simple and complex. The simple part is that state and federal policies that would improve the educational chances of poor and working class children need to address that problem directly and exclusively. Need-based scholarships for higher education must be vastly expanded at the federal, state and local levels. Tax money, both federal and state, not lottery or gambling proceeds, must be its base, and the tax systems must be effectively progressive. The issue is money, and the money needs to come from better-off families to help the kids who, through the arbitrariness of birth, start out life disadvantaged.