SAN DIEGO
It is difficult to find a college or university that does not have diversifying its student body on the top of its long list of goals and objectives, but one educator at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting said that many higher ed institutions are largely to blame for society’s widening social, racial and economic divide as many colleges’ own admissions policies keep out the very the populations they say they’re trying to admit.
In the session, “‘New’ Students: Who, What, Where, and When?” Dr. Gary Orfield, education professor and co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, argued that by increasing minimum scores required on the SAT and raising tuition without increasing financial aid, just to name two examples, colleges and universities are essentially shutting out a diverse pool of applicants.
Thomas Mortenson, senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, said that U.S. federal and state policies since the early 1960s had always served to increase educational access. But right around 1980, policies began to narrow, rather than increase educational opportunities, Mortenson said, ticking off examples such as tax cuts for the wealthy and financial aid packages that include more loans than grants.
Schools think that a U.S. News & World Reports ranking defines quality, Mortenson said, adding that U.S. News’ “more selective schools” have reduced the number of Pell grant recipients over the years. The “more selective” schools are actually more class selective, Mortenson added. For Pell grants to be really effective, he said, they need to be around $10,000. The fact that Congress quibbles over whether to increase the grant by hundreds of dollars is just “mind boggling,” said Mortenson.
And while on one hand the educators argued that both higher education institutions and policy makers could be doing more to increase college access, there are reasons to be optimistic about today’s college students, and some causes for concern, they said.
So who are today’s college students?
