Report details financial aid inadequacies

Over 400,000 high school graduates who are academically prepared to attend four-year colleges and universities will be unable to do so this year, and almost 170,000 of them will attend no college at all, according to a report issued in June by the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, a group that advises Congress and the U.S. Department of Education. The reason: record-high financial barriers produced by a combination of rising college tuition and a shortage of student aid, particularly need-based aid. The report is titled Empty Promises: The Myth of College Access in America.

Financial barriers prevent 48 percent of college-qualified, low-income high school graduates from attending four-year institutions and 22 percent from attending any college within two years of graduation, and students from moderate-income families fare only slightly better, according to the committee. The report follows up on a 2001 report, Access Denied: Restoring the Nation's Commitment to Equal Educational Opportunity, which asserted that a widespread shift among policymakers from a focus on access and need-based aid to a focus on middleclass affordability and merit-based aid has caused high levels of unmet financial need among the nation's poorest students, discouraging them from undertaking or completing college education. Some critics of the earlier report contended that the major barrier facing low-income students is not the cost of college but academic underpreparedness. Empty Promises addresses this question, concluding that "academic preparation does not inoculate high school graduates against the debilitating effects of high unmet need." The report predicts that the problems will only get worse unless a long-term commitment to increasing grant aid is made at the federal, state, and institutional levels.