I wonder how many Americans know that only one in SEVENTEEN children from households with income of $35,000 or less will get a college degree by age 24 (or the other statistics in the first three pages of the attached slides on "College data")?  I can only assume very few know that college is pretty much the bastion of the privileged elite -- and nobody else -- because otherwise there would be a big hue and cry over this horrifying state of affairs.

 

As  NYT editorial below correctly points out, the cost of college and lack of financial aid is indeed a major barrier to low income students and families. 

Partly as a result, high-performing students from low-income groups are much less likely to attend college than their high-income counterparts — and are less likely to ever get four-year degrees if they do attend.

These are ominous facts at a time when the college degree has become the basic price of admission to both the middle class and the new global economy. Unless the country reverses this trend, upward mobility through public higher education will pretty much come to a halt.

HOWEVER, in my opinion, the even bigger reason is that if you're low income and/or minority in this country, you likely attend lousy public schools that fail to prepare you for college.  As the 5th slide shows, nearly ALL college-ready high school students of ALL races attend college -- the REAL problem is that our K-12 public schools are preparing too few students, especially low-income ones, for college.

 

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November 23, 2006

Editorial

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/opinion/23thu3.html

Public Colleges as ‘Engines of Inequality’

Democrats who ran for Congress this fall made the cost of college a big campaign issue. Now that they’ve won control of the House and Senate, they can prepare to act swiftly on at least some of the factors that have priced millions of poor and working-class Americans right out of higher education. The obvious first step would be to boost the value of the federal Pell Grant program — a critical tool in keeping college affordable that the federal government has shamefully ceased to fund at a level that meets the national need.