College Divide Threatens to Keep the Poor Impoverished

[Frodo]

College divide threatens to keep the poor in poverty

By PAUL NYHAN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

The letters began arriving her sophomore year. The University of Southern California, UCLA, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Washington all courted Janae Brown, attracted by her B-plus average and a national academic award.

The interest was reward for the years Brown wedged college courses between her high school classes and a job selling shoes at J.C. Penney. With each honors class and paycheck, she moved closer to college and her goal of a white lab coat and medical degree.

Three years later, the Seattle native sits at a dingy 4-foot-wide cubicle, making $11 an hour chasing down delinquent Bank of America customers. Instead of attending the UW's first day of classes Wednesday, Brown, now 19, will go to work amid Renton's empty office buildings, fast food joints and car lots, one more kid in a stubbornly large group from poor families who are not in a four-year college.

Despite the lofty goals of presidents and policy-makers, over the past 30 years the poor have made little progress earning bachelor's degrees, increasingly the key to better jobs and middle-class security.

In 2003, 8.6 percent of the nation's poorest young adults earned bachelor's degrees by age 24, barely up from 7.1 percent in 1975, according to Postsecondary Education Opportunity, a higher education research group. This trend persisted even as more students enrolled in college overall.

"I am worried that we will become a stratified economy, like many in Latin America where the prosperous and the advantaged stay prosperous, and the poor and disadvantaged stay poor," Harvard University President Lawrence Summers said in an interview.

The divide between the wealthy and poor in educational opportunity threatens to perpetuate the cycle of poverty for thousands of working poor families. More than 147,000 low-wage employees fall into that category in King and Snohomish counties, and more than 80 percent of them never graduated from college.

The reasons low-income students don't go to college are complex and subtle -- pressure to help support their families financially, parents who offer little help because they never went to college themselves, and a system that drops many poor students into their senior years of high school unprepared for and unaware of the benefits of higher education.

The unrelenting rise in college tuition, which is squeezing both the lower and middle classes, only makes it harder.

The results of the problem are far clearer in an economy where a bachelor's degree has replaced a high school diploma as the minimum requirement for many jobs that pay decent wages.

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[AuH2O]

The beginning of the article leaves out the context of the one girl's case, which only was problematic in the first place because both her parents were crack addicts.

There is nothing the government can do to stop poor people from having too many kids and then not raising them. Well, early abortion advocates had that purpose in mind, but obviously that's not acceptable these days.

One part of the problem is that affirmative action is mostly race based, whereas a marginal majority of poor people are white (due to the fact there are many more whites than blacks, hispanics, etc.). Thus, minority scholarships generally go to middle and upper class blacks, rather than poor people of any race.

Colleges are desperate to claim they are "diverse," due to ideologically perverse racial notions (that ultimately are anti-white in character). Socioeconomic status thus goes out the window. There is also self-selection, because few poor people want to go to a school full of rich kids, even if they are offered a scholarship.

The government is at fault for propping up illegal affirmative action policies that hurt the poor, and at the local and federal level for poor secondary school performance. At the end of the day, though, family environment is the #1 factor, and basic demographic statistics make it clear blacks will not attend college at the same rate as whites for at least several generations, and in reality, not even then.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

The beginning of the article leaves out the context of the one girl's case, which only was problematic in the first place because both her parents were crack addicts.

There is nothing the government can do to stop poor people from having too many kids and then not raising them. Well, early abortion advocates had that purpose in mind, but obviously that's not acceptable these days.

One part of the problem is that affirmative action is mostly race based, whereas a marginal majority of poor people are white (due to the fact there are many more whites than blacks, hispanics, etc.). Thus, minority scholarships generally go to middle and upper class blacks, rather than poor people of any race.

Colleges are desperate to claim they are "diverse," due to ideologically perverse racial notions (that ultimately are anti-white in character). Socioeconomic status thus goes out the window. There is also self-selection, because few poor people want to go to a school full of rich kids, even if they are offered a scholarship.

The government is at fault for propping up illegal affirmative action policies that hurt the poor, and at the local and federal level for poor secondary school performance. At the end of the day, though, family environment is the #1 factor, and basic demographic statistics make it clear blacks will not attend college at the same rate as whites for at least several generations, and in reality, not even then.

I think you are confusing admissions and scholarships.  Race-based scholarships are generally considered unconstitutional, stemming from the court decision over the University of Maryland's Bannaker Key scholarships ten years ago.  I have a number of (white, upper-middle class) friends who got full scholarships to UMD following this decision, where as before it they were general limited to blacks.

Most schools phased out their race-based scholarships after this decision, although it has never been explicitly addressed by the Supreme Court.

[AuH2O]

Well, I think my statement may have been confusing in that I did not distinguish between public and private colleges.

Limiting the discussion to public colleges (since private schools can do as they wish in this area generally), financial aid decisions are still made on the basis of race, but the degree has perhaps declined somewhat. However, that bolsters my argument rather than weakening it.

My point was that middle and upper class blacks were benefitting both in terms of admissions and financial aid. Now, the latter is not so much a factor with public schools... but in the case of public schools, upper and middle class people do not need financial aid.

In other words, with regard to public schools, unqualified but affluent blacks are admitted en masse. They also get more financial aid, but that's harder to quantify. Friction over the issue is especially bad at competitive state schools, such as UVA, where racial tension is extremely high, to the point the media is writing stories about how "upset" black students are.

The University of Colorado is having similar problems.

The reason is simple: a growing number of whites are tired of paying taxes so their kids can be discriminated against on the basis of race.