Remarks to ACCESS College Foundation
November 15, 2005
I'm honored to be here - to talk about access and education - and to pay tribute to an organization that does much more than talk about it - the Access College Foundation. An institution that literally changes the life course of thousands of young Virginians. Think of that for a moment. Think of being able to look yourself in the mirror and honestly say that. Living out Vaclav Havel's definition of hope - which he characterized not as a prediction of success or a description of the world around us - but a predisposition of the spirit, a predilection of the heart. A conscious choice about the way we lead our lives. I'm honored to be among you.
I ask you to begin by thinking about what the Access College Foundation has accomplished in the past 18 years. Child and dream of Josh Darden and Frank Batten. Serving over 35,000 students in Norfolk, Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Suffolk and Virginia Beach. Helping to secure over $125 million in essential financial aid. Over $3 million in direct assistance. Placing needed advisors in each of the public schools in South Hampton Roads. Helping students take advantage of every possibility that lies before them. Including those not seen, or not existent, before. Offering the extended hand. The brightened lamp. Securing the joy and the challenge and the opportunity of first-rate education. Ennobling the hearts of young women and men. Pushing back against daunting tides of hopelessness and despair. Helping, through unfazed efforts, and through your generous contributions, to make the promises of the American democracy real.
And, to be candid, the work of the Access College Foundation could not come at a more crucial time. Because the gateway to American higher education - the promise that we now understand, without doubt, without qualification, to be the most indispensable feature of an appealing economic future and a society of self-comprehension and humane progress - the gateway to American higher education is not as wide or as clear or as visible or as unobstructed as we would wish it to be. At least not for all of us.
It does not mirror our democratic ideals, our foundational aspirations. Aspirations of equal citizenship, equal dignity, equal opportunity, of a fair and decent chance at success in life. I'll illustrate that this afternoon by reporting a series of relatively straightforward facts. And I'll try to be fairly unemotional about them - though that's not my natural inclination.
First, although we've made some progress - not enough, but clearly some significant progress - in opening access to higher education on the basis of race, the picture in terms of economic disparity is remarkably disheartening. A just-released national study concludes that if you hope to obtain a bachelor's degree by the age of 24, and you come from a family making over $90,000 a year, your chances are one in two - 50 percent. If your family makes between $60,000 and $90,000, your chances are one in four. If you come from a family with an annual income between $35,000 and $60,000, the odds go to one in 10. And if you make under $35,000, it's one in 17. One in 17. Opportunity at American universities tracks family wealth with surprising correlation - surprising, at least, for a nation that considers itself the most advanced and committed constitutional democracy in the world.
Second, and even more worrisome to me - because it strikes close to home - the disparity in favor of economic privilege is far more pronounced at the nation's most accomplished universities. Two years ago, the Educational Testing Service did an impressive study of the student cohort at the nation's 146 most selective colleges and universities. That report revealed that of that entire student cohort, fewer than three percent came from families in the bottom economic quartile. Nine percent came from families in the bottom half. And almost 75 percent, three quarters, came from the top economic quartile. There are 25 high-income students in our selective universities for every single student who is a low-income, first-generation collegian. 25. William Bowen, the former president of Princeton, has just published a study asking whether our elite universities are "engines of opportunity," as proclaimed, or "bastions of privilege," as he fears.
Third, we seem to be making it worse. Inequities in income representation in higher education have increased markedly over the past 15 years. Higher tuition rates, in Virginia and across the land; diminished public support; a growing political perception that education is a private rather than a public good; reductions in the percentage of state aid based on financial need; diminished purchasing power of federal financial grants - these have all played their parts. In 1975, Pell Grants, on average, covered 84 percent of university tuition. Today they cover only 34 percent. And the cuts to the federal student loan program presently being considered by the Congress will hardly improve the picture.
Maybe most disheartening, the last decade has witnessed a change in internal university financial aid practices - moving limited scholarship dollars away from need-based to merit-driven aid. A Lumina Foundation study found that today - unlike in earlier eras - private colleges give students from the wealthiest families more financial assistance per capita than students from the lowest income groups.
As one commentator put it, "while institutions are unlikely to admit it, improving their standing in the annual U.S. News ranking is a powerful incentive to shift internal grants toward merit aid. The higher the entering students' test scores … the higher the ranking in U.S. News." Letting the artificial standards of a popular magazine outpace the actual demands of public obligation.
Whatever the reason, and however one unpacks the underlying causes, studies regularly conclude that "American higher education is more economically stratified today than at any time in the past three decades." A widespread, functioning meritocracy - which we have assumed, or hoped for, since the middle of the last century - has not come to pass.
Sadly, unacceptably, driving inequalities in wealth, in health care, in my own field of law, even in access to the political process - these disparities are accompanied by massive inequities in educational opportunity - the one tool that we claim to deploy to give young women and men a fighting chance to overcome and surmount all these other barriers. Barriers not of their own making. Posing powerful tensions with our stated commitments to equal dignity and opportunity for all. As Larry Summers has put it, "increasing disparity based on parental position has never been anyone's definition of the American dream."
So maybe it's plain or obvious - when I say that my hat is off to the Access College Foundation. It's off to the powerful work of Bonnie Sutton and her colleagues. And to an array of other groups across the Commonwealth working on college preparedness, mentoring, and essential financial assistance. To the tough and unheralded work going on every day in our strong community colleges and four-year institutions - linking excellence and equity. Work like Old Dominion University's efforts with the Access College Foundation. And we are delighted this afternoon to announce the creation of new, aggressive articulation agreements with President DiCroce and Tidewater Community College. And efforts like our colleagues' Access Virginia program at UVA and our own Gateway initiative at William and Mary. Small steps, preliminary steps, to be sure. But steps that reject an inexorable tide of exclusion. Recognizing that talent and commitment and dedication and courage are not the exclusive province of those with significant economic means.
I salute these efforts, and I hope to be wedded to them, because I'm convinced with Robert Kennedy that "history will judge us on the extent to which we have used our gifts to lighten and enrich the lives of our fellows."
And I believe with Dr. King that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
Newer, more powerful, more ambitious commitments to access and opportunity are essential because Barbara Jordan was right that efforts "to remove obstacles that block individual achievement … obstacles emanating from race, sex and economic condition " are "indigenous to the American ideal."
Carrying forward Jefferson's command "that worth and genius be sought from every condition" of American life.
Because no child of this Commonwealth, or any other, chooses the circumstance, the position, the place, or the status of her birth. Our religions teach that every child is equal in the eyes of God. But we operate our educational systems as if we didn't believe it.
And I applaud the Access College Foundation's programs because so many of these Access families are like my own. Families without much money. Families where no one - no matter how many generations back you venture - ever had the slightest chance to go to college. I am, as you heard, the president of a distinguished American university. But I am no smarter, no more talented, no tougher, no more dedicated, no more committed, no more hard-working, no more capable, no more admirable, no more worthy - than my parents, or their parents, or their parents - or the long line of farmers and day-laborers and factory workers who came before them.
The difference is, in Neil Kinnock's words, that I was given "a platform upon which to stand." An accessible, affordable, tremendous public university - in my case, one in Austin, Texas - that opened doors for me that would otherwise have remained welded shut forever. That, and a set of parents who were unwilling to countenance a young man following what might be described as his "lower" ambitions. And, as you might guess, my father, also a large man, could be fairly persuasive - in a non-verbal way.
I think one of the greatest speeches ever given by an American president is an often overlooked one - the speech Lyndon Johnson made in 1965 before both houses of Congress, advocating the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Maybe that's because, unlike the rest of the world, I have an affinity for Texans with a tedious drawl. But Johnson began by saying: "This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose. The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart. 'All men are created equal'…. Those words are a promise to every citizen to … share in the dignity of mankind."
So my hat's off to the Access College Foundation and to all their colleagues in the vineyard of opportunity, because I'm convinced that you do the work of the future, the work of equality, the work of promise, the work of America, the work of the "dignity of mankind." Thank you very much. Congratulations and Godspeed.
