How Colleges Are Selling Out the Poor to Court the Rich

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-09/college-fina...

are reporting on findings from a report by Stephen Burd for the New American Foundation, "Undermining Pell: How Colleges Compete for Wealthy Students and Leave the Low-Income Behind."

http://newamerica.net/publications/policy/undermining_pell

http://newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/...

This has been an ongoing problem for a long time. Colleges seek the advice of consulting firms that tell the colleges how to maximize revenues, and one way to do that is to skew "financial aid" policies in favor of students from high-income families.

http://www.maguireassoc.com/services-challenges/optimize-net...

As a matter of talent development across the whole country, the United States finding consistently is that it is more advantageous for a child to a be a low-ability child from a high-income family than a high-ability child from a low-income family.

http://www.jkcf.org/news-knowledge

http://www.nagc.org/index.aspx?id=10000

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/education/scholarly-poor-o...

It's understandable why a parent who has money would want to use that money to give Junior leverage to gain upward social mobility. What's harder to understand is why publicly subsidized financial aid programs would fail to identify the most able students who lack family means to attend college, rather than being used by colleges to leverage the admission of even more average students from well-off families.

AFTER EDIT: Other comments in this thread are asking where parents and taxpayers can find information about the costs of each college. The United States federal government IPEDS database gathers data about college revenues and spending from all colleges in the country, and the federal data are presented in the most user-friendly format by the College Results website

http://www.collegeresults.org/

operated by the Education Trust. You can look up how radically colleges differ in what they spend per student and in graduation rates of admitted students, among many other interesting statistics, on the College Results site.

What a weirdly backwards way of phrasing it. Why should anyone take out a loan to get an education? Why would a public university charge tuition? My parents did not take out loans to get college degrees (in California, in the 1960s). But their generation got rich and now doesn't want to pay for the next generation to do the same. Should boomers who attended fully subsidized public education now really be let off the hook with their ridiculous claims that they're some kind of Randian superhero who worked their way up "on their own", and it would be "theft" to ask them to pay taxes so the same system they benefited from can continue?

It's certainly not impossible to do so, if people aren't so stingy. I moved out of the U.S. and now live in a country that has free public education. Not just free, but you get paid to attend university, up through a master's degree. (Not paid a lot, but a modest living stipend.) We have a lower unemployment rate than the U.S. does, too. And better transit and less bureaucratic healthcare.

Everyone??

Typical right-winger: I want low taxes and don't care about public services (although naturally I'd prefer public services to no services).

Typical left-winger: I want public services and don't care about low taxes (although naturally I'd prefer low taxes to high taxes).

Sorry, but... what?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but why should society pay for your exploration of your interests regardless of their applicability to employment?

We use employment as a means of converting skills into economic value. This is why when you work for a company or a government institution, you are given money in exchange for the value you produce. This value is determined by consumer and citizen demand for goods and services. What this means is that you need to produce something other people want, as opposed to what you want. Otherwise you won't have a job, because nobody will need your skills and knowledge.

Public education is a contract between the citizen and the (state) government. The citizen pays taxes to fund it, and in return his/her child gets a subsidized education. But that is where the contract ends. If the kid wants a job after that, they better make sure they are making the most use of the education by learning how to fulfill consumer and citizen demand in the economy. They can pursue their interest in botanics or cultural studies in their spare time, as hobbies.