Economic Inequality and Higher Education

"This collection of articles provides an excellent overview of the challenges facing students from low-income families, evaluates potential policies, and highlights avenues for future research. For all students, researchers, and policy-makers interest ed in higher education, it is a must read."
-INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR RELATIONS REVIEW

"The linkages between inequalities in the economy and in higher education are tight, bidirectional and, for those who want to believe in America as a land of oppor tunity, highly uncomfortable. Those who want to understand those linkages better and think about how to change them should start here."
-MICHAEL MCPHERSON

"Economic Inequality and Higher Education takes a clear and unflinching look at the inconvenient truth that higher education in the United States has bestowed its ben efits more generously in the upper rather than the lower part of the income distri bution. The essays collected here provide fresh diagnosis and welcome prescription for addressing this imbalance."
-CHARLES T. CLOTFELTER, professor of public policy studies, economics, and law, Duke University

The vast disparities in college attendance and graduation rates between students from different class backgrounds is a growing social concern. Economic Inequality and Higher Education investigates the connection between income inequality and unequal access to higher education, and proposes solutions that the state and federal governments and schools themselves can undertake to make college accessible to students from all backgrounds.

Economic Inequality and Higher Education convenes experts from the fields of education, economics, and public policy to assess the barriers that prevent low-income students from completing college. For many students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, the challenge isn’t getting into college, but getting out with a degree. Helping this group will require improving the quality of education in the community colleges and lower-tier public universities they are most likely to attend. Documenting the extensive disjuncture between the content of state-mandated high school testing and college placement exams, Michael Kirst calls for greater alignment between K-12 and college education. Amanda Pallais and Sarah Turner examine barriers to access at elite universities for low-income students—including tuition costs, lack of information, and poor high school records—as well as recent initiatives to increase socioeconomic diversity at private and public universities. Top private universities have increased the level and transparency of financial aid, while elite public universities have focused on outreach, mentoring, and counseling, and both sets of reforms show signs of success. Ron Ehrenberg notes that financial aid policies in both public and private universities have recently shifted towards merit-based aid, away from the need-based aid that is most helpful to low-income students. Ehrenberg calls on government policy makers to create incentives for colleges to increase their representation of low-income students.

Higher education is often vaunted as the primary engine of upward mobility. Instead, as inequality in America rises, colleges may be reproducing income disparities from one generation to the next. Economic Inequality and Higher Education illuminates this worrisome trend and suggests reforms that educational institutions and the government must implement to make the dream of a college degree a reality for all motivated students.

STACY DICKERT-CONLIN is associate professor of economics at Michigan State University.

ROSS RUBENSTEIN is associate professor of public administration at Syracuse University and a senior research associate at the Center for Policy Research.

CONTRIBUTORS: Stacy Dickert-Conlin, Ross Rubenstein, Eric P. Bettinger, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Dan Goldhaber, Robert Haveman, Michael Kirst, Bridget Terry Long, Amanda Pallais, Gretchen K. Peri, Amy Ellen Schwartz, Sarah E. Turner, and Kathryn Wilson.