Andy Kroll has a very good piece arguing that average families must spend increasingly impossible percentages of their household income if they want to send their kids to college:
Simply to ensure that a child attends a four-year public university, a family in the country's lowest icnome bracket now has to pay, on average, 55 percent of its total income (up from 39 percent in 2000); for a middle income family, the average is 25 percent (up from 18 percent in 2000); and for an upper income family, 9 percent (up from 7 percent)....Similar figures hold for four year private schools: In Missouri and Texas, almost 70 percent of family income is needed to pay college expenses for a four-year private school, after financial aid is included; in New York and Pennsylvania, it's nearly 90 percent.
These numbers seem to assume no financial aid or loans. In the past, we would expect that substantial financial aid money would be dedicated to less affluent students. After all, the best reason to raise state university tuition is to assure that people who can afford to pay more do...and that those who can't don't. But Knoll notes a problem:
Over the same decades, colleges and universities have stepped up the competition for affluent students. As a result, many institutions have actually increased the amount of aid they pay to higher-income students, and done so at a far faster rate than for lower-income students, who obviously need it more. "Engines of Inequality," a 2006 report by the Education Trust, a national education advocacy and policy organization, found that state flagship universities and a group of major research universities spent $257 million in 2003 on financial aid for students from families earning more than $100,000 a year. Those same universities spent only $171 million on aid to students from families who made less than $20,000 a year. Similarly, between 1995 and 2003, according to the report, grant aid from the same public universities to students from families making $80,000 or more increased 533 percent, while grant aid to families making less than $40,000 increased only 120 percent.
Why is tuition subsidy money flowing to more affluent students? Presumably it's because schools increasingly use scholarship dollars to win recruiting battles against competitors rather than to help poorer admittees meet their educational costs. One reason for this shift may be the growing importantce of rankings - such as the U.S. News University and College list. If a school wants to increase its ranking, it needs to attract students with top objective predictors. That means there will be titanic battles over someone who gets a 34 on her ACT exam. (I may work in Philadelphia, but I grew up in Chicago!) And the ranking process is iterative, because each year, university reputation is built in at least small part on the school's prior ranking. So the less one spends nabbing the top testers, no school can afford to skimp when it comes to recruiting top students.
It turns out that more affluent school districts produce - on average, of course - higher achievers on standardized tests. This means that if you need to lure top testers, the easiest and deepest pool is affluent kids. And once you've spent the money on the moneyed testing genius, the cupboard is bare for everyone else.
But why do Universities care so much about U.S. News? Can't you run a great university even at a lower ranking? Of course! But there will be some challenges. First, once a school starts down that hill, it may be tough to stop. If Alabama stops buying top students, they'll head to Georgia - both because Alabama's relative ranking (compared to Georgia) will drop and because Georgia may keep buying good students. Second, schools that slide in rankings may have more difficulty attracting top faculty. Over time, the disappearance of top faculty may result in loss of research money - and the overhead it brings in. And so on, and so on, and so on.
One crucial cost of our Rankings Culture is that it causes institutions to dedicate scholarhip resources to building a class rich in the particular resources that ranking organizations treasure. And if you want to run numeric rankings, objective measures - particularly national tests - turn out to be quite convenient for the job.
For a while it seemed that the Ivies were largely immune to this process - after all, a loss of a student here or there would seem minor to a Harvard or a Dartmouth. But even this is no longer true. For example, Cornell has publicly adopted a policy of using aid to recruit "students who are enrollment priority" - such as kids with top academic predictors. To be sure, the super-rich schools (like Harvard) adopted policies designed to insure that all students will moderate to low income could attend. But these policies were created before the market collapse, when the schools sought to avoid Congressional oversight of their (seemingly) bloated endowments. Now that the heat is off, we'll have to see whether they continue the commitment.
But for the 99% of students who won't go to Harvard, and particularly the poor and middle class ones with good - but not great - predictors, paying for college education has never been tougher.
All too true. And enforced by a reputational process where schools that try to avoid this arms race without losing ground are accused of "gaming" US News!
Posted by: Sam B. | April 06, 2009 at 10:47 AM