Boston Globe: Colleges reach out to poorer students, but still there are concerns

Parents Forum
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<p>"Yet a host of education specialists question elite colleges' commitment to economic diversity, citing evidence that top colleges are becoming increasingly stratified by income. While they applaud colleges for expanding financial aid policies, even allowing students to attend without taking out loans, they say colleges must do more to puncture the perception that expensive private colleges are reserved for the wealthy.</p>

<p>"All the financial aid in the world doesn't do any good if the students aren't admitted," said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a nonprofit public policy institute based in New York. In a 2004 study, it found that three-quarters of students at top-tier colleges came from the wealthiest socioeconomic quarter, but just 3 percent from the bottom quarter.</p>

<p>Demographic shifts are raising the stakes around college recruiting. The ranks of high school graduates are expected to thin in the coming years and become more racially diverse, making it critical for colleges to create pipelines of talented minority students.</p>

<p>But economic disparities on college campuses appear to be deepening.</p>

<p>In 2005, 14.3 percent of undergraduates at the country's 75 wealthiest private colleges received federal Pell Grants, which are awarded to students from families with annual incomes below $40,000. Last year, 13.1 percent received the grants as a wide range of colleges - including Duke, Yale, Boston College, Boston University, and Tufts - reported declines, according to an analysis by The Chronicle of Higher Education.</p>

<p>The proportion of low-income students at public flagship campuses also dropped over that period...."
Colleges</a> reach out to poorer students - The Boston Globe</p>

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<p>Top tier colleges are less diverse today than they were in 1980, and that is before the current meltdown. There are exceptions of course.</p>

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<p>Some schools are trying to fight this. I'm not sure that I would put Yale, Duke, BU, BC and Tufts in the group that are doing much. Most years, Yale has the highest percentage of private school kids among the Ivies.
My son was a Pell Grant recipient at Dartmouth and my daughter is above the line at Princeton. In both cases they made clear in the body of their applications that they were applying to these schools in part because they needed heavy financial aid. An admissions boost, if anything, at those two schools, IMO.
But the number of schools where a modest income is an advantage in admissions is elastic and finite. I'm guessing that the number of colleges where this obtains is smaller than it was a year or two ago.</p>

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<p>
[quote=Boston Globe, quoting Richard Kahlenberg]
"All the financial aid in the world doesn't do any good if the students aren't admitted,"

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Hear. Hear. It's still unclear to me how many colleges are adjusting their idea of what a well prepared applicant is like to take into account what some applicants can afford.</p>