Public Colleges Cherrypicking Students

by John O. Harney

There could hardly be a more pervasive trend in higher education than the ever-growing tension between market impulses and social equity -- between corporatization and public purpose.

Exhibit A: When taxpayers skimp on funding their state universities, those universities tend to respond by turning their backs on lower-income state residents and importing more affluent out-of-state students, who can pay the substantially higher out-of-state tuition.

Everyone knows that this shift has been going on for a decade or more. Now Thomas G. Mortenson, an Iowa higher-education analyst and Pell Institute senior scholar, has had the nerve to quantify it. According to his analysis, since the early 1990s public four-year colleges and universities in 28 states, including three New England states, have been dealing with their budget problems by increasing enrollment of out-of-state residents and decreasing enrollment of lower-income Pell Grant recipients. It’s “enrollment management at its worst,” wrote Mortenson, in his February Postsecondary Education Opportunity newsletter.

The campuses don’t bear all the blame. They dig for gold in the applicant pool as a direct reaction to disinvestment by state governments. Nationally, state support of higher education per $1,000 of personal income declined 34 percent between 1980 and 2006. The New England states are particularly notorious for their low public funding of higher education, with all but Maine among the 10 stingiest states by this measure.

Mortenson’s analysis suggests that the lower-income state residents shunned by four-year institutions are tracked (if they go to college at all) to for-profit colleges and underfunded community colleges, where the share of Pell Grant recipients rose in 39 states, including all six New England states. There’s nothing wrong with community colleges; they are responsive, proactive institutions, offering cutting-edge job training and, when good transfer policies are in place, a bargain entrée into higher education. But they aren’t meant to serve as higher education’s overflowing public-housing projects.

Most states are well on their way to building public systems of class-based higher-education opportunity, Mortenson says.

But his blistering critique is not limited to public universities. In an earlier analysis, he wrote of higher education’s “gated communities,” including more than a dozen selective New England private institutions, from Fairfield to richly endowed Harvard and Colby, where Pell Grant recipients now represent less than 12 percent of the students.

The disappearance of Pell recipients from these campuses suggests another grim new reality: The lower income students who are eligible for Pell Grants can’t cobble together enough financial aid from other sources to cover tuitions that are streaking through the stratosphere.

New England is host to a stunningly powerful higher-education sector. But it would be more stunning still if it were for everyone.

John O. Harney is executive editor of Connection.