Thursday Shorts – Unequal Education

There are very few poor students at America’s top colleges and an ever-expanding number of rich and richer ones, writes Andrew Delbanco in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. On the surface, this hardly qualifies as shocking news since America’s top private colleges have always been bastions of wealth and privilege. But of late, says Delbanco, the ratio tilts radically toward rich kids.

For instance, ninety percent of Harvard students come from families earning more than the median national income, “and Harvard’s dean of admissions was quoted in the Crimson a few months earlier defining “middle-income” Harvard families as those earning between $110,000 and $200,000.”

However the problem is not so much that our richest colleges won’t take poor kids. It’s that they don’t apply, writes Delbanco. It seems that lower-income students decide early on that their less-than-stellar public school educations have placed them too far behind the educational power curve to ever really compete, so give up before the application process ever begins.

There’s more. In fact the whole article is worth a read.

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Meanwhile back in California, college is becoming less and less affordable for more and more kids. Yesterday the California State University system approved another 10 percent fee hike, while the University of California’s regents approved their own seven percent hike—causing a crowd of unhappy students to demonstrate outside the meeting. The latter price jump means that the cost of attending a UC for four years, will now hit close to $100 grand—a daunting sum for most average families.

Or course, California is hardly alone in skyrocketing college costs. Across the country, college tuition fees have gone up over 200 percent since 1981, while inflation has gone up at less than half that rate.

Compounding the problem is the fact that, as tuition has gone up, scholarships and other forms of student aid have greatly dwindled due to slash-and-burn cuts by the Bush administration and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s own cuts in California. This means that a huge percentage of middle class kids, who aren’t rich enough to afford a hundred grand, but also aren’t poor enough to qualify for any real aid, are in danger of either being aced out altogether—or are forced to take out hefty loans, to be paid off after they graduate.

When the nation’s best public universities are leaving kids from average income families all but priced out of the UC market, it’s time for a recalibration of priorities.

No child left behind indeed.

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And as long as we’re on the subject of the deeply dysfunctional No Child (which is soon coming up for renewal) an article by the conservative-leaning Amit R. Paley in yesterday’s Washington Post has created a kafuffle in the blogosphere.

First Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly shared his thoughts that NCLB is a right wing plot to destroy public schools.

Then Matthew Ygleisas opined that Drum was having paranoid delusions and seeing conspiracies where there are none. But, Yglesias added, at best NCLB is a well-intentioned mess that shortchanges kids by promoting the lowest common denominator.

Drum retorted online, some other bloggers jumped in, and things devolved after that.

While the bloggers slugged things out, the WaPo reported that dozens of Republicans are thinking about bailing on a No Child reauthorization—pointing out that it undercut quality learning by forcing schools into cookie-cutter lesson plans that “teach to the test“—and that both schools and kids were suffering as a result.

In other words, good intentions And/or nefarious plots notwithstanding, the thing isn’t working. Instead, under its edicts, many of our failing public schools seem to be becoming more and more broken.

Which brings us back full circle to the first story about why smart kids who go to lousy high schools don’t bother to apply to the Ivy Leagues.

Like I said, recalibration of priorities badly needed.

Happy Thursday.