College Opportunity
I spent most of my flight to Spain and the past day here catching up on the reading for my Sociology class “Power and Inequality in Higher Education”. The readings focused on educational opportunity by income quartile, and argued that since the 1970s the opportunity for students in the lowest quartile of family income to continue on and complete a bachelor’s degree has fallen. Thomas Mortenson looked at Census data as well as data from the High School and Beyond dataset and concluded that the distribution of who goes on to college and finishes their bachelor’s degree by age 24 has shifted from the lowest to the highest income quartile. What does this mean? That the rich are now taking spots that the poor were taking in higher education in the 1970s.
Why has this happened? Student aid from the federal government has fallen since the 1970s, with caps on how much lower-income students could get each year during the early 1980s. At the state level, the amount of money we give to the public universities has fallen, and the cost has been passed on to students. This has the effect of squeezing out the lower income students, whose families cannot as easily pay the fees.
Why does this matter? In part because all of our taxes are paying for public universities, so it is only just that all of us (all income levels, all races and genders) should be represented in our public universities. If the population of California is 32% Hispanic, which it is according to the Census, then the universities that are supported by tax dollars (the UC and CSU systems) should have a student body that is about 32% Hispanic. If 10% of Californians live below the poverty level, then about 10% of California students in the public university system should come from below the poverty level. We’re all paying taxes after all!
I think a lot about this in my own family. While we have the privilege of being white, and owning a house, we’re also a lower income family. Certainly several of my siblings qualify in this regard. But they’re slodging through the Junior College system, intent on getting a nursing degree. How did I myself “make it” to where I am today, given my family background? I ask myself this when I read about college opportunity, and see the slim chances I had. I was lucky in so many ways, but also had to break through a lot of barriers since I was from a family where no one had a college education. How was I able to do this? How can I make a difference in the work I do to help equalize college opportunity so that who makes it to and through college better approximates the face of the larger population?
March 26th, 2007 at 8:06 am
It’s very interesting how taxation influences social issues–such as college and school finance issues. It makes me want to stop paying taxes 😉