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.