Dear Commons Community,
The Chronicle of Higher Education today has a featured article examining why college is seen less and less as a public good by legislators and education policymakers. The impact of this attitude is most pronounced on students of color. Reductions in state appropriations in particular are hindering these students from receiving a quality education. Here is an excerpt.
“As the population has grown more diverse, support has dwindled for grand efforts, like the GI Bill, to open doors to higher education. Coincidence?
The GI Bill opened the doors to college to returning World War II veterans, including many from immigrant families. They joined the professional class and became further integrated into American society.
At a recent town-hall meeting in Tucson, local business leaders took up education in the state of Arizona. They examined state support for public colleges — among the lowest in the country — and fretted about their future work force, says Gary D. Rhoades, a professor of higher education at the University of Arizona. They had even gone to the statehouse to meet with legislators, he heard at the town hall. “If you need to raise taxes,” the businessmen had told their representatives, “we’ll give you political cover.”
To their surprise, the professor recalls, the legislators waved off their requests. One reportedly said: “Those kids don’t need college.”
In a state where 60 percent of schoolchildren are Hispanic, and the legislature is overwhelmingly white, the words “those kids” have meaning.
“It’s not hard to figure out that when people say‘those kids,’ it’s a euphemism for African-American kids, Latino kids, Native American kids,” Mr. Rhoades says. “We have been systematically disinvesting in higher education, and that is precisely at the time when people who want higher education — lower-income kids, students of color, and immigrant kids — have increased.” As the student population has diversified, the language that many people use to define the value of a college degree has shifted, from a public good to an individual one. Is that merely a coincidence?
It’s a jarring question for a sector that sees itself as a great equalizer, in a society that aspires to be a meritocracy. But look at a range of evidence, and it seems that policy makers — with the encouragement or tacit acceptance of the public — have erected barriers to higher education based on race and class.
Lawmakers seem less willing to help today’s students. State support for public colleges in Arizona, as here at Arizona State U., is among the lowest in the country. Legislators reportedly told local business leaders, “Those kids don’t need college.”
That is a difficult theory to pin down, and one not everyone believes. As federal and state governments face many financial obligations, and budgets are tight, it may be facile to argue that a decline in public higher-education funding is grounded in racism. Jason Delisle, who studies higher-education finance at the American Enterprise Institute, points to the burdens of pensions, Medicaid, and K-12 school systems, drawing a connection between increased spending there and declines for colleges.
Other scholars in economics, higher-education policy, and cultural studies point to arresting correlations, though they’re subtle, shrouded in dog-whistle politics. Even in the dawn of the Trump era — after xenophobic and racist rhetoric energized the campaign of the populist billionaire — few policy makers would bluntly say they don’t want to pay for some students’ education because of the color of their skin.
Yet such attitudes have been documented, says Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “This is a well-known, constant theme in economics.” Studies have found that diversity is an impediment to the welfare state, of which education is part. A report by the Harvard Institute of Economic Research in 2001 concluded that Americans do not support European-style social-safety nets, including education benefits, because of racial fragmentation — and a belief that minorities benefit more from wealth redistribution. Countries like Finland, Japan, and South Korea beat the United States in educational attainment not because their people are smarter, Mr. Carnevale says, but because they are racially homogenous. And that seems to lead to broad public support for education.
Working on labor and education policy for many years, Mr. Carnevale, 70, has seen that dynamic at play. “White people my age are not going to vote to educate Hispanic kids or black kids,” he says. “All the great advances in education” — like the Morrill Act to create land-grant colleges in 1862 and the GI Bill to educate veterans of World War II — “have come when there was a strong white majority.” As those majorities have diminished, the public instead has pushed through measures to limit education benefits, restricting tax revenue, for example, cutting spending, and putting constraints on immigrant students.
The GI Bill is as notable for the people it left out as for those it helped up, like some students here at New York U. in 1945. Among white veterans who turned 18 from 1941 to 1946, 28 percent enrolled in college, while among their black peers, the rate was only 12 percent.
Despite barriers to higher education, national and local campaigns are encouraging more minority students to go to and finish college. But gaps persist, and as the higher-education system stratifies, black and Hispanic students disproportionately end up on campuses with fewer resources. Simply raising attainment, if even that happens, may not be enough. A nation’s fortunes grow as more of the population actually learns new skills and accumulates knowledge, says Mr. Carnevale. If we are going to rebuild our economy, he says, we have to find a way to give more students the promise of a high-quality education.”
The Chronicle article raises important considerations. The last paragraph above is insightful because even while student financial aid exists at the federal level and in many states, reductions of appropriations to our public higher education systems is stratifying many students of color to campuses with fewer and fewer resources.
Tony
