Four-year College Out of Reach for Many
High school graduates from low- to middle-income families are finding it harder to enroll in four-year, public universities because the costs of attending the schools are rising well beyond the ability of federal, state, and institutional grant aid to cover them, according to a new Department of Education report to Congress.
The report, The Rising Price of Inequity, found that initial enrollment rates for academically qualified high school graduates from low-income families fell from 54 percent to 40 percent between 1992 and 2004. For middle-income students, the rate fell from 59 percent to 53 percent. As a result, the report says, there’s a growing shift away from four-year colleges to two-year post-secondary schools by these students, and that dramatically lessens the likelihood that they will ultimately earn a bachelor’s degree. Among low-income students, those who enroll in four-year schools are three times more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than those who attend a two-year school.
Recent increases in need-based grant aid are “encouraging” but they “must be greatly intensified and broadened,” and the erosion of the purchasing power of Pell grants must cease. Maintaining access to four-year colleges for these students “is of paramount policy importance,” the report concludes, and shielding them from the rising costs of higher education is a “national imperative.”
Filed under: K-12 Education News
Tags: College, Education Policy, Public Policy, Research on Learning
