The University of California enrolls large numbers of talented students from all economic backgrounds. These four were more likely to succeed at Irvine than Harvard.
I’m glad my home state is provides friendly pathways to people like myself.
With the way the system has been set up for the public university system(s) in CA, I’ve had many friends who have graduated with a 4-year degree with little to no debt. I really do appreciate the work being done in making our higher education system work so well in CA.
The UC system stands out as a laudable model, a powerful engine of upward mobility for the state’s low- and moderate-income young people. It’s a shame more public universities don’t follow the UCs’ lead in doing such aggressive outreach and recruiting in low-income communities.
And privates, too. The top privates like to boast about how they meet full need even for very low-income students, and that’s true, but the problem is that most of them don’t enroll very many low-income students. They claim that they try, but at least in our area they spend far more time recruiting in the most affluent suburban school districts and the top private schools. The UCs’ success in finding, recruiting, and graduating large numbers of academically talented low-income students puts the lie to the usual lame defense put forward by most elite schools that academically capable low-income students are just not there to be found. The few that have put forth UC-like efforts to recruit low-income students, like Vassar (22% Pell grant recipients), Amherst (20%), and Pomona (18%), have dramatically increased the representation of low-income students in their student bodies, and they have found that these students are fully capable of succeeding at elite colleges.
For most public institutions, it’s more of a resource constraint issue. The vast majority of them can’t afford to meet full need, and that’s going to stand as a major barrier to low-income recruitment. But it’s also partly a question of institutional priorities. Some public institutions appear to be more intent on keeping down the sticker tuition price even at the cost of being able to provide need-based FA to students from low-income households. Keeping tuition down has a certain populist appeal–it sounds like it should benefit all students. But the net effect may be to keep down costs for students from higher-income households, while raising net costs for students from lower-income households because of the lack of need-based FA. Comparing two Midwestern public flagships, for example, the University of Iowa keeps in-state tuition and fees to $8,104 per year, lowest in the Big Ten and well below the University of Michigan at $13,856. But Michigan meets full need for in-state students, while Iowa meets only 60% of need on average. The net result is that while students from families earning $110,000+ pay about $7,000 less annually at Iowa than at Michigan, low-income students from families earning $30,000 or less pay twice as much at Iowa net of FA as at Michigan ($11,351 at Iowa, $5,529 at Michigan). I recognize, of course, that the finances of both schools are more complicated thn simply in-state tuition v. need-based aid. Michigan has a much bigger endowment to work with, for one thing. But the broader point about institutional priorities stands.
It has been deliberate state policy for decades to make higher education accessible to those from lower income families. Things currently done:
- Good in-state financial aid at state universities.
- Good transfer pathways for students starting at community colleges.
- Applications that do not require lots of checkbox items from others (recommendations, transcripts) that first generation and low SES students may not realize are needed until it is too late.
- Admission criteria at UCs that strongly consider overcoming adversity and do not consider legacy. (Note: CSU admissions is almost purely stat based, though thresholds can vary by major and local area residency as well as by campus and state residency.)
Keep in mind that the State of CA is huge: 38 million people. That is more than the population of the entire country of Canada. So there are lots of in-state low-income students from a pure numbers standpoint. Tuition at CA state U’s is free for families making less than $80,000, and as ucb pointed out, the admissions requirements are much less onerous than those for private colleges: no recommendations, no transcripts, no interviews, little in the way of ECs is required. AP courses are given full credit at all state Us (to my knowledge), so first-year students can enter with an entire year of credit from high school courses. And admissions preference is given to low-income applicants.
Yes, California is huge. We all get that. But the relevance of that fact in this context is dubious. California’s poverty rate (13.2%) is only slightly above the national average (12.6%). Some other high population states like New York (14.5%) and Texas (16.1%) have poverty rates significantly higher than California’s, with the consequence that although California’s population is nearly 50% larger than that of Texas, California has only about 30% more households living in poverty than Texas (4.7 million to 3.7 million). So there’s no shortage of low-income Texans for that state’s leading public universities, UT Austin and Texas A&M, to go out and find. Yet only 17% of each of those schools’ student bodies are Pell grant recipients, acording to NY Times data—more than most public and almost all private universities, to be sure, but nonetheless well below the figures achieved by at least 6 UC campuses. (I’m not sure why the Times excluded UC Riverside).
I think ultimately it’s a question of political will. California has always viewed upward social mobility for the least advantaged as one of public higher education’s most important functions. Consequently, a succession of legislatures and governors have generously funded need-based FA to an extent unmatched by any other state. A few other public flagships—Virginia, UNC Chapel Hill, and Michigan–meet full need (in Michigan’s case only for in-state students so far, but they’re in the midst of a $4 billion capital campaign that will raise sufficient funds to extend that policy to OOS students as well). But those are individual university policies, not state legislative priorities. A few other states provide fairly generous merit aid, but much of that goes to higher-income students and it doesn’t do as much to guarantee access for low-income students. And it’s also a question of political will and institutional priorities within the administration of the UC system, because it’s hard work to go out and find and recruit that many academically capable low-income students, yet they do it year after year. For other states and other universities, both public and private, upward social mobility has simply not been as important a political or institutional priority.
Their listings include colleges with 5 year graduation rates >= 75%, a proxy for high selectivity (179 colleges out of about 3,000 total four year colleges in the US). Six of the nine UCs made that threshold (UCSC, UCR, and UCM were the ones that did not).
See the top paragraph of http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/09/17/upshot/top-colleges-doing-the-most-for-low-income-students.html .
Another beautiful thing about the higher education system in CA is the very extensive and accessible CSU system, along with a vast network of coordinating community colleges. It is a system that works very well towards assuring some level of education to virtually all of its citizens who seek to improve. Not every person should be, or needs to be, or wants to be, educated at the level of the flagships (UCB, UCLA), but rest assured there is some education to be found no matter who you are in CA.
CA has the highest child poverty rate in the nation, at 27% http://www.kpbs.org/news/2015/feb/25/california-has-nations-highest-child-poverty-rate/
Congratulations to California for staying true to its mission to use education to help students get out of poverty. I don’t think they get enough credit for doing what they’ve done and continue to do. Truly heartening, when you consider that its outreach to low-income students has in no way undermined its place as a respected/prestigious institution - I’m referring not only to world-renown UCLA and Berkeley, but also Irvine and Davis, which have become attractive options for high-stats students. I wish other states will follow California’s lead.
Can other states provide higher education quality and opportunities like California?
One thing that shouldn’t be ignored is the effect of critical mass. A few weeks ago, there was an essay in the NY Times by a Hispanic woman – now a college professor – about her utter sense of confusion and incomprehension in her first month of college at Cornell. She owes her career, in large part, to a kind instructor who figured out she had no idea what she was doing and who gently guided her to various support resources she had no idea existed. If you have a lot of low SES students going through the process all the time, they can support one another, useful folklore develops and gets passed around, and professors, TAs, and deans get experience with strategies that work to overcome the academic and social difficulties that torpedo lots of low income students in college. Practice might never make perfect, but it probably makes better.
Hopefully CA’s commitment to educating the poor will improve its embarrassing child poverty rate one day. Irony, anyone?
The low income rate in California should be carefully interpreted. In CA, many people who have small shops, restaurants, or work as contractors pay little tax because they receive cash. They have houses, multiple cars, live confortably but their kids also receive Pell Grant and Cal Grant.
I suspect CA’s child poverty rate has a lot to do with young, poor immigrants in the state. If that’s the case, then California’s commitment to educating the poor – thus making it a really attractive place for the poor who have or expect to have children, and who want their children to be better off – may very well serve to increase, rather than decrease, its child poverty rate.
All of which goes to show why one shouldn’t place undue weight on any simple policy measure like “child poverty rate.”
^That makes it sound like there’s lots of fraud going on.
You can call it fraud or CA way of life. UC Irvine rank 1 in this category because parents of many UCI students have this way of life in the big Orange and LA counties. North CA has similar way of life but the “low income” students concentrate in UC Davis because UCB is too selective.
Absolutely. No doubt about it. But that is the moral hazard of using Fafsa only – some/many immigrants at the top UC’s have family wealth (held offshore). My son’s best friend from HS lived in the nice gated community part of town, and officially, his dad did not ‘work’ and had not since he was in his mid-30s.
When he applied to UC, he marked, ‘unemployed’ or something similar on the app.
Is there a state that has a better articulated CC transfer policy than California? The Cal-Grant system is also a tremendous help in getting lower income students the money they need to make community college possible, and the UC Blue & Gold system gives another financial boost when students transfer or enter directly as freshmen.
What I found more interesting about the list is the almost random mix of private colleges below the top 10. It clearly doesn’t matter a great deal how much the endowment is per student – some private colleges do a lot more than others to recruit low income students.