This is nothing new. Paper just looking for clickbait?
1 Like
In a way, yes. In the present-day WWE/DOE even economic diversity is considered controversial and you don’t hear a lot of college leaders trumpeting the idea. This article is simply saying the quiet part out loud.
The role that economic diversity is playing in their institutional plans has been shifting over the decades.
To admittedly oversimplify, early on, say in the first few decades after WWII, basically these colleges had recognized that in a modern industrialized economy, it would benefit the children of parents with high social, political, and financial capital (aka white shoe kids) to mix with some kids who had very high intellectual capital (brown shoe kids).
Roughly in the 1990s and on, there were increasing concerns about the growing gap beween the wealthiest versus the working and middle classes, and eventually some sharply critical exposes of how skewed these colleges were despite their well-publicized aid policies. And they manifestly responded to that criticism–a bit. They remained very skewed but a little less so than in, say, the early 2000s.
In parallel, though, there were dynamics involving gender, race/ethnicity, religion, and so on. And until recently, they had a relatively free hand to try to shape the diversity of their classes in those ways directly. But now with the exception of gender, that sort of thing is largely illegal.
So I wasn’t able to read that article because of a paywall, but I know in general it seems that many of these colleges have further ramped up their efforts to become more economically diverse, possibly in part just as a continued response to the criticisms of lack of economic diversity, but also possibly in part as a sort of substitute for what they can no longer do with ethnicity. Which in US society is going to sort of work, although obviously not as predictably.
The article specifically focuses on Pell grant recipients as a surrogate marker for poor kids. It’s a meaningful departure from the “brown shoe“, “Horatio Alger“ trope that was popular in the 1920a and repackaged in the Sputnik years following WWII. These kids require significant accommodations even after they arrive on campus. The article specifically mentions ordinary items like money for laundry. I know of cases where room and board during holidays and breaks are major considerations.
Yeah this isn’t going to be very precise, but I think something like 35% of college students nationally receive Pell Grants, give or take, and as of the early 2000s the most selective colleges tended to be around 10%. Economic “diversity” mostly meant some middle-middle to upper-middle class students to go along with the full upper class students.
So that became a bit of a scandal, and now they might be over 20%, but that of course is still not the same as the general number.
And you are right that traditional financial aid alone is usually not sufficient to make even that increase workable, they have had to invest more in various other forms of support. As came up in the recent Middlebury thread, there are all sorts of costs to send a kid away from home to a residential college that are easily covered by higher income families, but are a real strain, or not possible at all, for sufficiently low income families. And then other issues as well.
Of course this is all good, I believe these colleges should be spending these resources in this way, and should in fact keep doing more. But it definitely represented a new phase for them.
Of course, Pell eligibility would be higher among all high school graduates, but college attendance still skews toward higher SES.
But it would be a misconception to see “Pell = poorest people” when eligibility would be close to half of the high school graduating population.
Yeah, Pell grants typically go up above the true lower income groups into what most people would think of as something like the lower-middle class.
So I would more turn it around. If only 10% of your students are getting Pell grants, that means very few of your students are even lower middle class.