Where does a high school senior whose parents didn’t go to college turn to understand the application process?
What resources are available to a student from a remote rural area if she wants to apply to college?
These questions and hundreds more like them are the ones I think about every day. While the number of affluent students graduating from college has grown over the years, the figure has been disturbingly stagnant for low-income students, despite billions of dollars and thousands of national and local programs.
For instance, while there’s been a 38 percentage-point increase in the number of college graduates for high-income students since 1970, there’s been a 3 percentage-point increase for low-income students in that same timeframe.
Nine percent of young adults from the bottom quartile of family incomes obtain a bachelor’s degree by the age of 24.
According to a recent study, 51 percent of Pell grant recipients enrolled in four-year nonprofit institutions nationwide graduate from college.
The rate is higher at Swarthmore. However, the solutions need to be bigger than one institution.
