Guide to Education Grants

Another Student Loan Resource:
At one time the United States could point to the
fact that it was the highest educated nation in the world. Unfortunately, it
does not appear that low-income students are getting a fair piece of that
pie.  This is especially true  when you consider that it is largely those
who come from wealthy families that get to attend the most prestigious
institutions and get those degrees, year after year.

According to the Jan. 12, 2007 article by Peter Sacks titled
“How Colleges Perpetuate Inequality” that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher
Education’s The Chronicle Review, not
much has changed in the last 30 or so years. Sacks reports the following:

“The chance of a low-income child
obtaining a bachelor’s degree has not budged in three decades: Just 6 percent
of students from the lowest-income families earned a bachelor’s degree by age
24 in 1970, and in 2002 still only 6 percent did. Lower still is that child’s
chance of attending one of America’s
top universities.”

This disturbing trend is explained in a book by Daniel
Golden entitled The Price of Admission:
How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges – and Who Gets Left
Outside the Gates, where Sacks says, it “details the myriad ways that, for
those born with silver spoons, standards are relaxed and hands are held through
every stage of the admissions process at selective colleges. In return for such
favors, wealthy parents and donors lavish such institutions with money.”

Golden “Names Names”

As mentioned in the article, the book “names names and finds
smoking guns.”  Sacks gives examples such
as “fudged academic standards for rich kids at the high price of ‘the integrity
of [its] admissions process’” at one school and admitting “well over 50
percent” of family members of a group of wealthy donors where the institution’s
admission rate is only 9 percent at another.

The article cites Golden’s book which suggests that the
problem is mainly that, “elite colleges have largely ignored socioeconomic
disadvantage in their calculations of merit and their definitions of
diversity.”

No Easy Answers

Sacks admits that such low-income students have “few, if any
advocates” and even fewer instances where programs at top schools benefit a
tangible number of those in need. This is the case because schools including
Harvard, University
of Virginia and others
“deliberately limit their numbers of low-income students.” I mentioned that
fact in an earlier post when I discussed changes to state financial aid
programs for lower-income students.

The answer, though a relatively straightforward one, would
not be easy to implement. The article reports Golden’s solution, that colleges
should “adhere to ‘wealth blind’ admissions: They should abolish preferences
and build ethical fire walls between admissions and development offices to
prevent conflicts of interest.”

The question remains, will a full-fledged reformation ever
actually take place, especially when considering the amount of funds that come
from wealthy donors to schools such as Harvard, who has an endowment that
exceeds $25 billion?

Now that the current session of congress is in full force,
hopefully low-income students and their families will reap the benefits and
feel the widespread impact of new federal financial aid legislation.

It is important to keep up to date on all the news regarding
student loans and education.

Talk to the education financial advisors at
NextStudent.  They have all the
information and advice you need on student loans.  Check out www.nextstudent.com.

Be sure to tune in next Monday for my next blog on student
loan issues in the news.

Student Loan Girl

Technorati Tags: NextStudent, College Funding, Student Loans, Financial Aid, Consolidation, Student Loan Consolidation, Next Student, College Admissions, Admissions Inequality, Price of Admission

This entry was posted on Friday, January 12th, 2007 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Education Funding News, Money for College. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.