Colleges pledge support for low-income students

Nineteen state public university systems aim to boost access and graduation rates, address cost.

By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the November 1, 2007 edition

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Higher education leaders hear the rumbling – the steady complaints that college is too expensive, and that even for those who manage to find funding, too many fail to graduate.

In response, the heads of 19 state university systems are joining to make sure their policies match their rhetoric about more diversity and better learning. At stake, say policymakers, business leaders, and academics, are America's competitiveness, and its ability to deal with the costs of an aging baby-boomer population.

The National Associa­tion of System Heads (NASH) announced the launch of the Access to Success Initiative Oct. 31. Its main goal is to improve college attendance and completion for low-income and minority students – and to close the gaps between them and other students in half or more by 2015. The 19 systems – from Maryland to California – will start collecting new sets of data to gauge progress.

"They're going to publish this information ... so they can have an honest dialogue and make good on that public commitment to transparency," says Ross Wiener, a vice president at The Education Trust, a nonprofit that designed the tracking system with NASH. The initiative is backed by the Lumina Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

This new level of leadership reflects a growing concern that the low percentage of college degrees among some segments of US society holds back not only individuals, but the nation as a whole.

Demographic projections for K-12 education show a steady rise in the numbers of low-income and minority students, many of whom would be the first in their family to attend college. "Every year it gets more clear that ... the students we need to do best by ... are the students that we've done worst by in the past," says William Doyle, assistant professor of higher education at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

There's also a fairness issue, some say. "Capable students should not be denied a higher education simply because of their income status," says Tom Meredith, NASH president.

Only 36 percent of college-qualified low-income students complete bachelor's degrees within 8-1/2 years, compared with 81 percent of high-income students, according to last year's report by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. And while state funding for merit-based scholarships has grown 300 percent in the past 30 years, need-based aid has grown only 70 percent in the same period, The Education Trust reports.

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