Council of College Board Annual Colloquium
January 6, 2007
Sunny Isles Beach, Florida
I bring you greetings from the College of William and Mary—my beau ideal of a small-scale, intimate, highly engaged, life-changing, liberal arts public university and the second oldest, but the most beloved institution of higher learning in America. I said that "most beloved" thing in a talk up at Harvard last year—and they didn't disagree. Harvard may be older, but William and Mary is more beloved.
I wasn't sure how to approach our topics tonight. Considering your focus—challenging questions of access and incentives and competition and accountability. And thinking how to add something—particularly given your talented and thoughtful array of speakers and attendees. I'm a washed-up constitutional lawyer. So I was drawn to thinking for a moment about the Michigan case of two or three years ago. Thinking about one sliver of it—but one that at least some commentators have linked to the powerful brief the Carolina folks filed. And which, in the opinion, came finally from the pen of William and Mary's new Chancellor—Sandra Day O'Connor.
Justice
O'Connor wrote: "law schools represent the training ground for a large
number of our nation's leaders . . . [and] it is necessary that the
path to leadership be visibly open" to all segments of society. In a
powerful way, that statement broke new ground. It recognized that more
is at stake in our affirmative action battles than the quality of the
classroom experience—vital as that is. The graduates of the nation's
strong universities enjoy a disproportionate access to opportunity and
authority in the private and public sectors of our economy. Selective
universities and professional schools constitute distinctive pipelines
to our principal corridors of power. The processes designed to channel
these remarkable resources, Justice O'Connor reminded, must be patently
open to us all.
The Michigan case, of course, explored
the accessibility of selective higher education when it comes to race.
The justices concluded, thankfully, or beyond thankfully, that
universities need not be agnostic about the effective integration of
their halls. Let's hope it stays that way. But what if we were to cast
Justice O'Connor's question more broadly? What if we asked about the
diversity of selective student bodies on the basis of class or economic
status?
As you know, or as is now increasingly well understood and broadcast, the great institutions of American higher education—as well as their vital professional schools—are seemingly constructed on a foundation of economic advantage—that is bad and getting worse. We're frequently behaving in ways that widen the breach. A breach that cannot be squared— and this is my simple point tonight—with the promise of America.
The facts.
In this company, I am almost embarrassed to mention these statistics. Before people who know much more about them than I. Facts that have now become a sort of familiar litany—a familiar and demoralizing litany. But I'm a university president—so no one expects me to be either original or non-repetitive. And giving about twenty-five speeches a week, I'd say if they did expect that, I, for one, would be put quickly out of business. But let's think for a second about what we all effectively know.
The Educational Testing Study of three or four years ago, surveying the student cohorts at the 146 most selective American universities, found that about 3% of the students came from families in the bottom economic quartile; 9% from the bottom half; and a whopping 74% from the top quarter. Similarly, another study last year determined that if you seek a college degree by the age of twenty-four, and if you come from a family with an annual income of $90,000 or more, your chances are better than even—perhaps 75%. On the other hand, if you hail from a family making $35,000 a year or less, your odds are one in 17. One in 17. At the more selective universities apparently about one student in twenty-five is a low-income, first-generation collegian. As if wisdom, intellect, drive, ambition, and virtue were somehow hereditary.
Last year's ETS study concludes that our "highest achieving low-income students actually go directly to college at rates about the same as our lowest achieving students from wealthy families." We have, reportedly, "less mobility [in this country] than 20 years ago and less than most other advanced industrial nations." As Larry Summers has written, "increasing disparity based on parental position has never been anyone's idea of the American dream."
And we're all, apparently, playing our parts. Diminished state support has led to higher tuition rates at public universities. In 1975, federal Pell Grants covered, on average, what is it—over 80% of the costs of university tuition. Two years ago, it was apparently 34%. State governments have increased non-need-based financial aid by far greater percentages than need-based aid.
Even the Spellings Commission—apparently launched with an agenda to bring some version of "No Child Left Behind" to higher education—even the Spellings report found that "persistent financial barriers . . . unduly limit access" to our universities. Troubling gaps between college attendance rates of low income Americans and their more affluent peers—constrain meaningful opportunity. Too many students are discouraged from attending college . . . or take on worrisome debt burdens to do so. The playing field is badly askew.
The Commission made an ambitious and heartening—and apparently unwelcome—recommendation to the Secretary and the Administration—returning Pell Grants to a benchmark of 70% of the cost of tuition.
Sadly, unless I missed it, Secretary Spellings hasn't been able to embrace this particular recommendation. I suppose it teaches that one ought to be careful in asking what the biggest problems in American higher education actually are. You might not like what you hear.
And maybe most disheartening, and, in this venue, closest to home, the Department of Education has reported that the lion's share of the last decade's university institutional financial aid increases have gone to students in the top economic quarter. The Lumina Foundation Report of a few years ago came to the same conclusion about tuition discounting by private universities—now those in the top quarter get more, on average, than those at the bottom. Without fanfare or even perhaps transparency, turning traditional notions of financial aid on their head.
As one commentator put it: "While institutions are unlikely to admit it, improving their standing in the annual US 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 US News." Letting, apparently, the artificial standards of a popular news magazine outpace our actual commitment to equal opportunity and public obligation.
And I'd like to focus last—and saddest—in my own particular neighborhood—the great public universities of America. The flagships. The research-extensive publics. The historic gateways to democratic opportunity —gateways that carry the promise that no matter your background or pedigree—that if you work hard, excel in school, you too can press your dreams, by attending your state's flagship public university. Opening doors; lifting hearts; changing lives.
As, again, the Education Trust's just-released study (funded by Lumina) last month revealed—and as those of us who toil in the public vineyards have long known—that compact has been quietly altered.
How we spend our own institutional financial aid dollars can dwarf many of the allocations from other sources. Education Trust concludes that over the last decade "even as the number of low income and minority high school graduates in their states have grown, the flagships are becoming whiter and richer."
In 2003, public research universities spent $257 million of their institutional aid dollars on students from families making over $100,000 per year. They spent only $171 million on students from families making $20,000 or less. The number for the $100,000 plus families rose from $50 million eight years before—$50 million to $257 million. The figure reported for families making under $40,000 rose—over the same timeframe—by just $75 million.
So now—at the public research flagships—a category into which (with some adjustments) one would put my own school—on average—students coming from families making over $100,000 a year get $3,800 in institutional aid. Which is higher, on average, than what low or middle income students receive. High income, high achieving students are four times more likely to go to flagships than high achieving, low income students.
Smaller percentages of low income students enroll at public flagships than twenty or thirty years ago. In the last decade, Pell-eligible students rose from 29 to 35 percent of all university attendees. At public flagships, they fell from 24 to 22 percent, and we increased institutional grants to low income students by 29 percent and to the wealthiest by 186 percent. As if even the great publics no longer believed in their own missions.
Placing these disconcerting patterns together—connecting the immensely unpleasant dots—it is increasingly crucial—with each passing month—to ask whether we will continue to be satisfied—particularly at the most accomplished levels of the academy—with educating for privilege. Whether that can be squared with who we are. Or at least who we say we are. Whether it can be squared with the promise of America. Lincoln thought that the central idea of America was that the weak would gradually be made stronger and, ultimately, all would have an equal chance. The central idea. Barbara Jordan claimed that removing barriers to opportunity—barriers arising from race, from sex, from economic condition, is "indigenous to the American ideal." But what was central to Lincoln, or indigenous to Jordan, seems to have become alien to us.
Pondering these matters last week, I was reminded of the statement Lyndon Johnson made forty years ago in his famous address at the University of Michigan: "Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty." In a different context, Johnson put it far more personally: "Tell them that the leadership of your country believes it is the obligation of your nation to provide and permit and assist every child born in these borders to receive all the education that he can take."
To me, that nudges toward the crux of it. First, because no child here in Florida or in Virginia or in the rest of the nation chooses the neighbor-hood, the community, the school district, the higher education system, or the family into which she is born. Our religions teach that all children are equal in the eyes of God. But we fund our schools—and frequently open our gates to opportunity—as if we didn't believe it.
Second, I've always loved Johnson's phrase "all the education he could take." And this is personal to me, perhaps because it's just the way my father would have said it. "Boy, you need to get all the education you can stand." Reminding us—as all first-generation collegians know—that we are no better, no smarter, no tougher, no more worthy, no more committed than our parents or their parents—or all the generations before them—who never had the opportunity of a college education. The difference, of course—as Neil Kinnock once put it—is that we have been given a "platform upon which to stand"—a platform consisting of excellent, accessible, life-altering higher education.
So, for me, I am much taken with programs like the path-breaking Carolina Covenant, Access UVA, and our own Gateway program at William and Mary. My hat is off, as well, to the marvelous and growing efforts at many of the nation's most accomplished private universities—Harvard, Princeton, Yale—sometimes going even farther than the programs of the publics—though they will hardly be a complete solution. I read recently that there are more Pell-eligible students at Berkeley than in the entire Ivy League.
I have been interested to see, as well, steps like those by Tony Marx at Amherst to build economic disadvantage more powerfully into the admission process. Because money is far from the only causal factor creating disparities like the ones I have outlined and as William Bowen's work has shown. Amy Gutmann has written, for example, that only 4.5% of the students scoring over 1200 on the SAT come from families in the bottom economic quartile.
Under constitutional law as I understand it—which, as I said, is not completely unschooled—there is no legal hurdle to employing economic status as a factor in admission decisions—to achieve a more diverse, and a more instructive, student body. I have little doubt that there will be political objections, small and large, to such efforts—but the constitutional tremors of racial affirmative action law are not triggered by economic diversity sought as a goal in its own right.
These are heartening starts, essential starts—starts that call for expansion, modification, renewal and support. Starts that are expensive and challenging and that require movement beyond the poorest students—into the middle classes. Starts that will lead down false trails, and reveal missteps, and that will require even greater effort to make the promise of equality real. But they are essential efforts—if we are to be anything like what we claim to be. If we are to close the massive gaps, the disheartening gaps, the growing gaps, between what we say and what we do. But we have surely faced larger challenges before. Climbing uphill to achieve the work of democracy is in our DNA.
I'm guessing that Fannie Lou Hamer didn't do an opinion poll before she started the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and that Rosa Parks didn't conduct a focus group before she sat down for freedom.
Last year I read Ralph Ellison's posthumously published novel, Juneteenth. There, Ellison has his main character say this: "We are a nation born in blood, fire and sacrifice. Thus we are judged, questioned, weighed—by the ideals and events which marked [our] founding. These transcendent ideals interrogate us, judge us, pursue us, in . . . what we do, or do not do. They accuse us ceaselessly, and their interrogation is ruthless, scathing . . . until, reminded of who we are, and what we are about, and the cost[s] we have assumed, we pull ourselves together. We lift our eyes to the hills and we arise."
