By Robert Shireman, Executive Director of California Competes
Michael Dannenberg, Director of Strategic Initiatives for Policy at Education Reform Now
Kudos to former Mayor Michael Bloomberg for a campaign he announced last week: His charitable foundation and others will fund more college counselors and outreach services to get thousands more talented, low-income students to attend, and graduate from, high-quality colleges.
That’s urgently needed to live up to the American ideal of equal educational opportunity. Despite the fact one in five students with a top score on the ACT exam comes from a working-class or low-income family, you are 25 times more likely to bump into a rich kid than a poor one on the campuses of America’s 173 most selective undergraduate institutions.
But outreach and financial aid are of limited use if top-flight colleges systematically pass over talented, low-income students. The dirty little secret about higher education is that, despite well-marketed outreach and generous financial aid programs, many wealthy colleges embrace policies that undermine low-income students’ chances of ever being admitted, much less enrolled.
Until we confront those bad habits, we’ll only attack the problem around the edges.
Perhaps the most nefarious ways elite colleges reproduce inequality…read more here.