Why the White House Summit on Low-Income Students Matters

Why the White House Summit on Low-Income Students Matters

Richard Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation.

Yesterday, socioeconomic diversity on college campuses—an issue long overshadowed by the question of diversity by race—took center stage at the White House,  President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and the staffers Gene Sperling and James Kvaal convened an extraordinary meeting of more than 100 college presidents and 40 businesses and philanthropies to promote greater access and success for low-income students of all races.  The price of admission for participants was agreeing to make a tangible commitment to improve opportunities for disadvantaged students—a pledge to increase the proportion of students eligible for Pell Grants, for example, or to create a new mentoring program or a new high-school-outreach program.

It would be tempting to dismiss this meeting as a one-day effort among a relatively small number of institutions. After all, most colleges across the country did not make commitments to greater equity and were not represented at the conference. Moreover, the effort was limited to the extent that the White House announced no new federal programs to support colleges in promoting educational opportunity for low-income students.  But putting the prestige of the White House behind an effort to extract pledges to increase socioeconomic diversity at a significant number of colleges represents a remarkable paradigm shift in American higher education. For almost 50 years, socioeconomic diversity has been higher education’s disfavored stepchild in comparison with racial diversity. Racial and socioeconomic diversity are related, of course, but they also represent distinct concerns, and in the past colleges have been much more willing to take on the former challenge than the latter.

Socioeconomic gaps are much larger than racial gaps. Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, for example, found in a 2010 Century Foundation report that while white students are overrepresented at the nation’s most selective colleges by 15 percentage points, the most socioeconomically advantaged quarter of the population is overrepresented by 45 percentage points.  Likewise, in college admissions, while universities claim that they provide a boost to both underrepresented minorities and low-income students, careful research suggests that that is not true. A 2005 study by William Bowen found that while being black or Latino increased one’s chance of admission to selective colleges by 28 percentage points, being low-income did not increase one’s chances whatsoever.

Why has higher education shown more progress in promoting racial diversity than socioeconomic diversity? For one thing, racial diversity (or a lack thereof) is more visible to the naked eye than is economic diversity. It is also more expensive to provide financial aid for low-income students than to recruit upper-middle-class students of all races. And while civil-rights groups are admirably organized to place pressure on colleges to address a lack of racial diversity, there are no strong constituency groups to lobby on behalf of low-income students per se.  That’s why the White House program to elicit from colleges concrete action plans for advancing economically disadvantaged students of all races is so significant. Effectively, the president and first lady threw their power and prestige behind a group that is largely voiceless in higher education.

At the summit, colleges made a wide variety of pledges to help a mostly powerless constituency:

• Franklin & Marshall College committed to raise its financial aid budget by 10 percent.
• Miami Dade College agreed to provide mandatory advising for all first-time college students who have skills gaps.
• Northeastern College committed to provide 150 full-tuition, need-based scholarships to graduates of Boston Public Schools.
• Pomona College committed to increase the proportion of students receiving Pell Grants from 17 percent to at least 20 percent.
• SUNY at Stony Brook committed to increase its four-year graduation rate to 60 percent by 2018, through expanded tutoring and a freeze on tuition for low-income students, among other steps.
• The University of Arkansas committed to establish a six-week summer bridge program for low-income freshmen.
• The University of Minnesota pledged to close the first-year retention rate between Pell-eligible students and those not receiving Pell Grants.
• Vassar College will expand pre-orientation and support programs for low-income students and military veterans.
• Yale University plans to increase by 50 percent the number of low-income students admitted as part of the QuestBridge program.

What’s notable about those commitments is not their scale but that they were made despite incentives not to aid low-income students. The U.S. News & World Report rankings—chief arbiter of who is up and who is down—give no credit for enrolling low-income students; indeed, putting resources into financial aid could take money away from activities that do improve a college’s rankings.

Significantly, President Obama’s own speech at the White House summit reinforced the day’s message about the salience of class over race. He pointed to his wife’s remarkable rise as a first-generation college student and implicitly contrasted that with the Obamas’ daughters, Sasha and Malia, who, at Sidwell Friends School, are showered with intensive advising and support not available to low-income students.  Of course, Sasha and Malia are not typical of African-American students nationally, who are disproportionately poor and will disproportionately benefit from the programs that Obama champions. Which is precisely why, in the long run, the White House summit may prove good not only for socioeconomic diversity but for racial diversity as well.

The White House is surely aware that the legal winds are blowing against the explicit use of racial preferences in college admissions. In that sense, the president’s emphasis on low-income students of all races is welcome on two levels. He encourages colleges and universities to take new steps on behalf of economically disadvantaged students, for whom higher education has fallen short. And he is stimulating colleges to create—through a variety of programs—what may well become the affirmative-action plans of the future.

Senators Consider Changes in TRIO and Gear Up College-Prep Programs

I read with interest this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.  It is not a surprise that too often policymakers think that just throwing more money at a problem/challenge is all that is needed. Reading the statements from some of those at the meeting, it appears they think just providing larger Pell grants is all that is needed. And an option is to kill off TRiO and GEAR Up to find more money. Who said it, "simple solutions to complex problems are almost always wrong." Having additional financial aid does not provide mentoring, tutoring, encouragement, counseling, and all the other resources needed for timely college completion. One of the problems is that our policymakers had lots of social capital, are 2nd or 3rd generation college-goers, family members who provided financial support to eliminate need for lots of college part/full-time jobs, and the rest. While they may think life was hard, it is no comparison to the students served by TRiO and GEAR UP. What students need is not a more generous ATM to dispense money, but a full-featured package to support their success. But that kind of answer does not fit the mold for a simple solution. -- David

Senators Consider Changes in TRIO and Gear Up College-Prep Programs By Andy Thomason

While President Obama was urging college presidents on Thursday morning to follow through on their new commitments to improve access for low-income students, lawmakers on Capitol Hill dusted off some older promises for examination.  The U.S. Senate's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee met for a special "round table" to discuss changes in two federal programs that aim to improve access by helping needy and minority students prepare for college—TRIO and Gear Up. The hearing was part of the coming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. 

Consistent with past reauthorization hearings' focus on simplifying federal higher-education policy, some senators on Thursday questioned whether the two programs were still relevant.  Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the committee's senior Republican, asked a group of five panelists if the budgets for TRIO and Gear Up, which each encompass several separate programs, would be better spent on more Pell Grants.  Members of the panel giving testimony largely defended the programs' benefits, saying they offer one-on-one counseling and support that many students cannot get anywhere else, among other things.  Tallie Sertich, director of the Climb Upward Bound program at Hibbing Community College, in Minnesota, said many students who received Pell Grants "still need the academic preparation that the TRIO program provides on the front end."

But senators and panel members agreed that simplifying federal student aid was in order. Senator Alexander alluded to past testimony that recommended shortening the main federal-student-aid application and informing students during their junior year of high school how much aid they will receive, among other changes.  Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who testified on Thursday, said such simplification "has been a great idea for years," and the committee should ask the Department of Education why it has not happened.  Other panel members stressed that simplification was only part of the solution. "We need a bunch of big strategies to make a big dent" in the access problem, said Douglas N. Harris, an associate professor of economics at Tulane University.

Senators and panel members also focused on how to improve elementary and secondary education in order to increase college access. "Kids from low-income families come to the K-12 system already seriously behind," Mr. Haskins said, adding that "the K-12 system makes them further behind."  Sen. Elizabeth A. Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, widened the discussion, asking panel members to suggest ways to drastically increase the number of degree holders over the next several years. Members of the panel suggested more spending on TRIO and Gear Up, along with a greater focus on community colleges and precollege education.  Sen. Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and chairman of the committee, concluded the hearing by suggesting that the way forward for TRIO and Gear Up may be "incentivizing states to come up and support" the programs.

Opportunity Makers: Influencing Opportunity for Low-Income Students

OPPORTUNITY MAKERS:  Caroline M. Hoxby & Sarah E. Turner.  Two of the people identified by the Chronicle of Higher Education as making a difference during 2013.

Caroline M. Hoxby and Sarah E. Turner have devised an inexpensive way to get high-achieving, low-income students to consider selective colleges, an idea that has received widespread attention this year.  They're opening doors for low-income students

In a phenomenon called "undermatching," such students usually end up at places with fewer resources, less-prepared classmates, and lower graduation rates.  Ms. Hoxby, a professor of economics at Stanford University, and Ms. Turner, a professor of economics at the University of Virginia, devised an experiment in which they mailed college information to high-school students whose family incomes were in the bottom 25 percent and whose test scores were in the top 10 percent.

In the randomized trial, the professors sent one group of students general college-search information, another group information on college costs after financial aid, a third group application-fee waivers, and a fourth group all of those. A control group got nothing. The mailings cost only $6 per student.

And they worked. Students who received the combined information—and remembered getting it—submitted 48 percent more applications than did those in the control group. They applied to colleges that had a 17-percent higher graduation rate and an 86-point higher median SAT score. And the students enrolled in colleges that were 46 percent more likely to be places where their classmates were equally prepared.  Getting students to go to certain colleges wasn't really the goal, Ms. Hoxby told The Chronicle this past spring. It was to help them choose. "To not make decisions well simply because you don't know what's out there," she said, "that's sad."

Now she and Ms. Turner, both 47, are collaborating with the College Board to expand their work. Already packets based on the economists' experiment have been sent to 28,000 high-school seniors, and the College Board plans to email them, too. It also expects to expand the outreach to younger students. About 35,000 high-achieving, low-income students graduate from high school each year, and very few apply to any of the country's 230 or so most selective colleges, according to a previous study by Ms. Hoxby and another researcher.

At least one state, Delaware, is also joining the effort, announcing this fall that it would collaborate with the College Board and send information to an additional 2,000 students.  While the researchers have found that families are wary of information from colleges themselves, Harvard University has said it will conduct similar outreach, encouraging students to consider it and other selective institutions.  It's been a big year for the idea of undermatching: White House officials met with college presidents to discuss it, and it underpins Michelle Obama's recent focus on expanding college access.

Still, not everyone is sold on the solution. Catharine Bond Hill, president of Vassar College and an economist, argued in a letter to The New York Times that as long as many selective colleges "reject talented low-income applicants because of students' financial need," then without extra aid, "getting more low-income students to apply to top colleges will just result in more rejections. Of course, students could be rejected from selective colleges for any number of reasons. But nobody goes to one without applying first.

Advanced Placement Courses and Historically-Underrepresented College Students

From the New York Times.  ORLANDO, Fla. — Every year, more than 600,000 academically promising high school students — most of them poor, Latino or black — fail to enroll in Advanced Placement courses, often viewed as head starts for the college-bound. 

Some of them do not know about these courses, which offer an accelerated curriculum and can lead to college credit. Others assume they will be too difficult. But many are held back by entrenched perceptions among administrators and teachers, whose referrals are often required for enrollment, about who belongs in what has long served as an elite preserve within public schools.

“Many teachers don’t truly believe that these programs are for all kids or that students of color or low-income kids can succeed in these classes,” said Christina Theokas, director of research at the Education Trust, a nonprofit group. Ms. Theokas said that if those underrepresented students had taken A.P. courses at the same rate as their white and more affluent peers in 2010, there would have been about 614,500 more students in those classes.

In an effort to overcome those obstacles, an increasing number of school districts, including Boston, Cincinnati and Washington, have recently begun initiatives to expand Advanced Placement course offerings and enroll more black and Hispanic students, children from low-income families and those who aspire to be the first in their generation to go to college. In the spring, lawmakers in Washington State passed legislation encouraging all districts to enroll in advanced courses any student who meets a minimum threshold on state standardized tests or the Preliminary SAT exam.

While some critics say A.P. classes are little more than another round of test prep, supporters say they can foster a culture of learning. Humberto Fuentes, a senior here at Freedom High School taking his first A.P. classes, in English literature and economics, said they were the first time he had been around peers who enjoyed school.

“In regular classes, people are trying to distract you with music videos or saying, ‘Hey, look at this cat playing a piano’ on their phones,” said Humberto, 17, who emigrated with his parents from Ecuador when he was an infant and hopes to be the first in his family to attend college. “Whereas in an A.P. class, they will show you something from the text and say, ‘Hey, this is fun.’ ”

<Click on this link to read the rest of the article from the New York Times.>

Counseling Makes a Difference for Low-Income Students Attending College

From Inside HigherEd by Scott Jaschik.    "A theme of several studies in the last year has been that there are plenty of academically talented low-income students who for some combination of reasons are not applying to competitive colleges to which they would probably be admitted.  A new study along those lines -- this time documenting the impact of intense college counseling -- was released Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The study (abstract available here) found that a nonprofit group that focuses on college counseling in Minneapolis-St. Paul had a significant impact in increasing the rate at which low-income students enrolled in four-year colleges, including competitive institutions.

The study was conducted by Christopher Avery of Harvard University -- co-author (with Caroline Hoxby of Stanford University) of a study released in December that found that most highly talented, low-income students never apply to a single competitive college. That work has set off widespread discussions about what sort of interventions might make a difference.  Avery's new study looks at College Possible, a program that provides in-depth college counseling as well as tutoring on the ACT or SAT. Avery was able to study the impact of the program by comparing results on College Possible participants with those who applied to (and were not admitted to) the program despite having slightly better academic preparation.  The study found no statistically significant gains in ACT scores for those who participated in the program. Avery writes, however, that this may understate the impact of the program, because he suspects that some of those who didn't get into College Possible found test-prep services elsewhere.  But the study found a significant impact on College Possible participants in applying to and enrolling in four-year colleges, and especially to competitive colleges. More than 45 percent of the students in the College Possible program enrolled at a four-year college, while the figure in the control group was 34 percent. And the most popular college among those in the program was Augsburg College, a competitive liberal arts college that did not enroll a single student from the control group (though some would appear to have been academically qualified had they applied).  The findings could be significant in that the earlier Avery-Hoxby study noted that low-income students who enroll in more competitive colleges are more likely to land at institutions with better graduation rates, more financial aid, and more resources to promote their academic success.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/29/study-tracks-impact-counseling-low-income-students#ixzz2j7MWcOPu

The Hidden Supply of High-Achieving, Low Income Students: Many low-income high achievers never think of applying to selective schools

From the National Bureau of Economic Research:  In The Missing "One-Offs": The Hidden Supply of High-Achieving, Low Income Students (NBER Working Paper No. 18586), Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery study every student in the high school graduating class of 2008 who scored at the 90th percentile or above on the SAT or ACT and whose high school GPA was A- or above. They show that despite the fact that these high-achievers are well qualified for admission at America's most selective colleges, the vast majority of low-income high achievers do not apply to any selective school.

More than 50 percent of low-income high achievers apply exclusively to non-selective two-year and four-year schools that typically have low graduation rates and low instructional resources. Only 8 percent of them apply in a manner similar to that of high-income high achievers, who normally apply to several "peer" schools where the median student has scores like their own, the graduation rate is high, and instructional resources are ten times those at non-selective schools. High-income high achievers also usually apply to a few "reach" and "safety" schools.

These authors show that because low-income high achievers rarely apply to selective colleges, there are many more low-income high achievers than admissions staff thought. What the admissions staff see are eight to fifteen high-income applicants for every low-income applicant. However, the ratio of high-income high achievers to low-income high achievers is only about two-to-one in the population.  The authors eliminate a number of explanations for low-income high achievers' failure to apply to selective colleges, including cost. They show that very selective colleges offer high-achieving, low-income students such generous financial aid that they could attend these colleges and pay less than they are currently paying to attend the much less selective colleges in which they enroll.

Nor do low-income high achievers fail if they apply to selective colleges. The authors show that if a low-income student and a high-income student with the same achievement apply to the same college, they have outcomes (matriculation, persistence, on-time graduation) that are so similar that they cannot be distinguished statistically.  A lack of effort on the part of selective colleges does not explain these results, either. Their admissions staffs visit hundreds of high schools, organize campus visits, and work with many local college mentoring programs.

Why, then, do the vast majority of low-income, high-achievers not apply to very selective colleges? The authors show that those who do not apply are dispersed: they are "one-offs" in their high schools and localities. Thus, there is no cost-effective way for colleges to reach them using the traditional methods listed above, all of which work best when students attend a school with a critical mass of high achievers (such as a magnet school) or live near a selective college (such as the Harlem students who live near Columbia University). This dispersion also explains why the students' counselors do not develop expertise about very selective colleges. If a counselor has 350 advisees (the typical number in the United States) and only encounters a high achiever once every few years, that counselor will develop skills to help her other advisees -- many of whom may be struggling to stay in school or attend any postsecondary institution -- rather than skills that will help the rare one-off.

Counseling Program Improved Needy Students' College Options, Study Finds

Low-income students who were coached and tutored by a nonprofit group during their last two years of high school were more likely to enroll in four-year colleges and to end up in more-selective institutions, according to the results of a study.  [Click to read the original article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.]

The study focused on College Possible, a group based in St. Paul that uses AmeriCorps mentors, most of them recent college graduates, to prepare students for college.  The study drew on a trial involving 238 students in eight high schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul, 134 of whom were randomly selected for admission to the after-school program.

College Possible mentors assist students with SAT and ACT preparation, advise them on college admissions and financial aid, and help them with the transition to college.  Interventions such as sending students text messages about steps needed to prepare for college or providing them with customized college information have been found to affect their choice of whether and where to enroll.

College Possible's founder, Jim McCorkell, said that finding is important because low-income students are more likely to "undermatch," or to end up at colleges that don't challenge them."  While 73 percent of upper-income American teenagers go on to earn a college degree, only 8 percent of low-income students do, the report says.  After participating in the program, students set their goals higher, enrolling in four-year rather than two-year colleges and shifting from less-selective to more-selective institutions, the study found. For instance, among students in the control group, 34 percent enrolled in four-year colleges and 30 percent in two-year colleges. For those who received the extra support, 45 percent enrolled in four-year colleges and 19 percent in two-year institutions.