Interrupting Class Inequality in Higher Education

Leadership for an Equitable Future

Laura M. Harrison, Monica Hatfield Price

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138669000
• eBook ISBN: 9781317210665
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Interrupting Class Inequality in Higher Education explores why socioeconomic inequality persists in higher education despite widespread knowledge of the problem. Through a critical analysis of the current leadership practices and policy narratives that perpetuate socioeconomic inequality, this book outlines the trends that negatively impact low- and middle-income students and offers effective tools for creating a more equitable future for higher education. By taking a solution-focused approach, this book will help higher education students, leaders, and policy makers move from despair and inertia to hope and action.

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PART I

Understanding the Problems

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1

THE PERPETUATION OF CLASS INEQUITY THROUGH POLICY

Calls to address the educational disparities between lower and higher socioeconomic status (SES) students have been made for decades. As far back as 1947, the Truman Commission declared, “It is the responsibility of the community, at the local, State, and National levels, to guarantee that financial barriers do not prevent any able and otherwise qualified young person from receiving the opportunity for higher education” (PCHE, 1947, p. 23). However, the gap between the educational attainment of low SES students and high SES students is growing (Pell Institute, 2015). The time has come for the higher education community to reverse the trends and close the education attainment gap between low and high SES students. This chapter suggests that a better understanding of the higher education policy arena may ensure that the policy system changes to incorporate the values and needs of stakeholders concerned about the education of economically diverse students.

Higher Education Policy Primer

Policies are rules to direct behavior and resources. As such, policies are a mechanism for (in)equity. Public policy, as the name implies, pertains to matters that have been deemed to affect the public good. There are numerous public policy topic areas. Public policy is designed for fields such as natural resources, health care, social welfare, and education. Therefore, higher education policy is situated within the larger context of public policy.

Some higher education policies are made and enforced at the federal level while others function at the state, local, or institutional level. However, there is no mention of education in the US Constitution. Technically, the responsibility for educating citizens falls to the states (US Department of Education, n.d.). In reality, the federal government’s role in higher education is increasingly bureaucratic and the states’ financial responsibilities are increasingly unmet. Some states are better than others at considering the socioeconomic levels of their citizens and providing support for those who need it. Similarly, particular institutions within a state are better than others at considering the SES of their students and providing aid. However, overall recent trends demonstrate that higher education policies are not adequately supporting low SES students.

Ensuring that the higher education system improves rather than exacerbates the socioeconomic divide in the US will take collective effort. Small, isolated campus programs are certainly wonderful for the students they help. However, to address this inequality problem, large-scale thinking is also appropriate. As think tanks and advocacy groups have long understood, a key to large-scale change is policy makers. Federal, state, and institutional policy makers are influencing the upward mobility of students in myriad ways. Understanding how the issue of higher education is framed for policy makers may shed light on why the system continues to reinforce the class divide.

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A Goal of Equity

Stone (2012) contends that there are five primary goals for policies: equity, efficiency, welfare, liberty, and security. The focus of this book is equity, yet, we acknowledge additional arguments could be made that the perpetuation of socioeconomic inequality are matters of efficiency, welfare, liberty, and security as well. For example, in a global economy, we gain more US economic security when the country invests in increased numbers of college graduates rather than economically relying on the shrinking number of families that can currently afford higher education for their student.

A challenge with equity, as with all the policy goals, is that disagreement exists about what is equitable. Even in higher education policy scholarship, equity is not clearly defined (Dar, 2014). Equity concerns fairness. However, fairness in distributing something may not always involve equality. Equal is not always equitable. For example, in education, some students are advanced and some are behind. If everyone is given the same support (equality), then some students will not have enough support to succeed. Equity, on the other hand, means providing differentiated support to help everyone succeed.

When questions of equity arise, Stone (2012) advocates the consideration of three dimensions: recipients, items, and process. A starting point for understanding equity in a policy issue entails clarifying the recipients. This means identifying who is intended to receive the benefits from the policy and how the recipients will prove eligibility. Understanding equity also entails clarifying the items that are intended to be distributed. What precisely is the benefit that is meant to be distributed? Finally, consideration of the distribution process builds understanding of equity in a policy issue. This means identifying what process will be used to distribute the intended benefits to the intended recipients. Exploring the dimensions of recipients, distribution items, and process can illuminate (in)equity in policy.

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To demonstrate that it is helpful to scrutinize recipients, items, and process to illuminate (in)equity, consider the trends in policy to provide free community college. While the free community college policy trend is growing across the country (Harnisch & Lebioda, 2016), there are differences in how the states address equity. In some states, the free community college programs are designed to contribute the “last dollar.” After a student has used all existing federal and state financial aid they qualified for, the last dollar programs cover any tuition expenses that remain. Although the process dimension is the same across all students, the dimensions of recipients and items vary.

The last dollar programs have made higher-income students the benefit recipients under their free community college policy design. Existing federal and state financial aid programs already cover the community college tuition of low-income students. However, compared to low-income students, higher-income students qualify for less federal and state aid. Therefore, the largest student group with tuition not covered by existing federal and state financial aid is comprised of higher-income students. Higher-income students are not the student group that policy makers heralded as the recipients benefiting from the free community college policy.

Then, consider the item actually intended for distribution in the free community college policy issue. Free community college policy for the states with a last dollar design is about tuition. However, for other states, the item intended for distribution is a broader interpretation of financial aid. States interpreting financial aid more broadly acknowledge that for the poorest students, the non-tuition expenses associated with college attendance are as prohibitive as tuition. The last dollar programs have a narrow definition of the item for distribution. To them, the item is simply tuition. As a result of last dollar free community college programs, as Harnisch and Lebioda (2016) argue, “state resources will be re-directed from the poorest students at community colleges needing help with non-tuition expenses, as well as those needy students choosing to attend public four-year universities” (para. 27). This example of last dollar free community college policies illustrates how recipients and items distributed are identified differently across the states, and how questions of equity can arise from the different policy approaches.

Addressing issues of equity and improving the education of economically diverse students is paramount for the US because now the majority of public school students are from low-income families (Southern Education Foundation, 2015). State data collected by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) reveal that 51 percent of public school students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. For higher education professionals who may not be familiar with these indicators, free lunches are available to families whose income is less than 135 percent of the poverty income threshold, and reduced price lunches are available to families whose income is less than 185 percent of the poverty income threshold.

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For decades the number of low-income students being served by the country’s public education system has grown, but now it has reached a majority level. In 1989, less than 32 percent of the students were low income. By 2000, the number had climbed to over 38 percent. Six years after that the rate was 42 percent. But after the Great Recession, in 2011, 48 percent of public school students were low income. Then, in 2013, low-income students became the new majority in America’s public schools (Southern Education Foundation, 2015). As the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) (Witham, Malcom-Piqueux, Dowd, & Bensimon, 2015) summarizes, “the population of young people on whom the nation’s future depends will increasingly be comprised of children from groups who have been historically excluded from, tracked out of, and served most poorly by existing higher education structures” (p. 7). These figures help demonstrate the imperative of providing higher education to low SES students.

Higher education policies that are increasingly unrepresentative of the students the US needs to educate raise the issue of equity. Because education is cumulative and the higher education pipeline is filled from the nation’s K-12 system, the growing number of low-income K-12 students requires policy makers to revisit the accessibility of higher education for economically diverse students. Again, referring to the Truman Commission’s suggestions almost 70 years ago, the Commission asserts:

There must be developed in this country the widespread realization that money expended for education is the wisest and soundest of investments in the national interest. The democratic community cannot tolerate a society based upon education for the well-to-do alone. If college opportunities are restricted to those in the higher income brackets, the way is open to the creation and perpetuation of a class society which has no place in the American way of life.

(PCHE, 1947, p. 23)

The Commission’s statement makes a strong argument for equity in US higher education, yet the systemic differences between education for the well-to-do and the poor continue today.

The purpose of reflecting on the sentiments expressed years ago by the Truman Commission is not to suggest that prior eras appropriately addressed issues of equity. Reflecting on these earlier sentiments demonstrates how deeply engrained the issue of (in)equity is for higher education. It is worth remembering that once upon a time, college was exclusively reserved for the education of wealthy men who were being groomed as civic leaders and clergymen (Brubacher & Rudy, 2008). Higher education in our country did not begin as an equitable venture. At the time they were provided, the Commission’s recommendations to improve access by eliminating financial, race, sex, and religious barriers were seen “as an absolutely terrible idea by many leaders in higher education” (Gilbert & Heller, 2013, p. 428). Exclusion has a long history in US higher education.

That former leaders felt eliminating financial, race, sex, and religious barriers to higher education was an “absolutely terrible idea” reminds us that policy is an entirely human construct. Policy makers are just people. Some policy makers are highly educated, and some are not. Some policy makers are conservative and some are liberal in their outlook. Some policy makers are very experienced and some are brand new. The point is, policy makers are simply people crafting rules. Just like the rest of us, their beliefs and their decisions are a reflection of what motivates them and what makes sense to them. Therefore, it is helpful to consider the socially constructed nature of policy.

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Social Construction in the Policy Process

Schneider and Ingram (1993) introduced the Social Construction Framework to help explain how the policy process works. Within the framework, a target population is the intended recipient of benefits or burdens of a policy. Schneider and Ingram posit that policy makers socially construct target populations in either positive or negative terms and then allocate benefits and burdens that reflect and perpetuate these constructs (Ingram, Schneider, & deLeon, 2007). Ingram, Schneider, and deLeon contend that the framework is helpful in explaining “why public policy, which can have such a positive effect on society, sometimes—and often deliberately—fails in its nominal purposes, fails to solve important public problems, perpetuates injustice, fails to support democratic institutions, and produces an unequal citizenship” (2007, p. 93). Thus, the framework can be helpful in exploring why higher education policy continues to perpetuate socioeconomic inequality.

The Social Construction Framework provides five propositions that are helpful in considering how higher education policy perpetuates economic inequality. The propositions concern allocation, feedback, origins, changing social constructions, and policy change (Schneider, Ingram, & deLeon, 2014). The last two propositions, changing social constructions and policy change, will be discussed in Chapter 6. In the present chapter, we use the first three propositions to explore the socially constructed nature of higher education policy. Understanding the socially constructed nature of policy reveals how changeable policy is.

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Allocation

The first proposition of the Social Construction Framework concerns allocation. The framework posits that “The allocation of benefits and burdens to target groups by public policy depends on the extent of their political power as well as their positive or negative social construction” (Schneider, Ingram, & deLeon, 2014, p. 109). This means that the framework considers two dimensions of the target population construction: the political power of the group and the positive or negative social construction of the group.

As Figure 1.1 depicts, target groups who have high political power and positive social construction are known as “advantaged” (Schneider, Ingram, & deLeon, 2014, p. 110). The proposition suggests that the advantaged group will receive more policy benefits and less policy burdens than the other three groups. In higher education, an example target population that is advantaged is merit scholars. O’Shaughnessy (2011) reports that merit scholarships are often awarded based on grade ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Interrupting Class Inequality in Higher Education
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Understanding the Problems
• Part II Forging the Solutions
• Index