By Sara Goldrick-Rab
We’ve long understood the fundamental connection between education and democracy, building national prosperity in the twentieth century by making high school free nationwide. More than a century ago, American policymakers realized that neither family wealth nor the resources of your community should determine access to secondary schooling.
Not everyone supported this perspective. In fact, high school was even seen as an elitist institution. When the movement for free public high school began in the 1800s, opponents tried to rouse populist sentiment against free secondary education by describing it as a “contrivance of the rich to rob the poor,” as it was the children of the well-off who attended high school. Yet when high school became free, families from all walks of life came to get educated.
The moment for college to be considered in the same way has come.
Higher education is no longer seen as a choice or a luxury — it is viewed as the only available next step and, indeed, the only hope for those who want a middle-class life. High school graduates are more convinced than ever that their only viable option for a better life is college.
Though some argue that the United States can’t afford to make college free, key policymakers (Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Claiborne Pell, and others) believed that helping people get educated would in turn help the nation. Providing access to higher education was a clear and seemingly fair way to do that. In the 1960s, when federal financial aid policy was first formulated, the nation was in the midst of a period of economic growth and security, declining poverty, and great social change. Women, African Americans, immigrants, and working-class white people were all clamoring for a shot at middle-class jobs and the American dream. Politicians in Washington wanted to help.
Passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965 dramatically increased federal investment in higher education and provided grants and loans for students attending public and private colleges. In 1971, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Education debated a bill introduced by Senator Claiborne Pell that took things a step further, establishing as a policy of the federal government “the right of every youngster, regardless of his family’s financial circumstances, to obtain a postsecondary education.”
His actions followed those of the Truman Commission, which in 1947 recognized that college costs impeded the nation’s ability to double the number of college goers (from 2.3 million in 1947 to 4.6 million by 1960). While that commission took steps to create more affordable institutions of higher education — most critically, the nation’s community colleges — Senator Pell and his colleagues believed that it was also important to subsidize the costs of college. The bill provided $1,200 annually for each student to use as a voucher to lower the amount of tuition they paid at the college or university of their choice. In 1972, the bill passed, and the Pell Grant was born.
The creators of the current federal student aid system knew that college degrees brought real opportunities. The architects of the financial aid system did not, however, envision college as the only route out of poverty. During the same period, Congress invested in jobs programs, a safety net for those left behind, and Head Start for the children of poor families. The emphasis was on college as one option, one possible pathway, and the Pell Grant Program was organized to support that emphasis. The grant could be taken to any college or university in the nation participating in the federal student aid program, providing students with a wide range of options, and policymakers hoped that the higher education marketplace would respond by ensuring that opportunities were of the highest quality.
The creation of the financial aid system followed more than a century of investment in public higher education, which began some 80 years before the Truman Commission with the creation of land grant universities through the Morrill Act of 1862 and the GI Bill 1944. By the time the Pell Grant was created in 1972, 80 percent of American college students were enrolled in public colleges and universities. “American states poured enormous resources into building public systems of higher education: flagship universities were expanded and outfitted for an extensive research role,” historian Roger Geiger writes. “Teachers colleges grew into regional universities; public urban universities multiplied and grew; and a vast array of community colleges was built.” Economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have linked these major investments in public education to a growth in human capital that enabled the United States to thrive as a global economic powerhouse.
But despite these overt commitments to higher education as a public good, Claiborne Pell’s vision for how to bring more equality of opportunity into the American system hasn’t been realized. Soaring rhetoric about the value of hard work in the mouths of politicians — think, for instance, of one-time presidential candidate Ben Carson — obscures the fact that family money has long been one of the best predictors of college success. The Truman Commission pointed this out in the 1940s: “For the great majority of our boys and girls, the kind and amount of education they may hope to attain depends, not on their own abilities, but on the family or community into which they happened to be born or, worse still, on the color of their skin or the religion of their parents.”
Should breaking the link between family income and degree attainment be a public priority supported by taxpayer dollars as it once was with high school? Certainly several states say yes. In the late 1960s and 1970s, states including California, Florida, Michigan, and North Carolina invested resources in their public colleges and universities in order to keep tuition low, while also creating state need-based aid programs to complement the federal Pell.
Students took up the cause too, as in 1969, when large numbers of African Americans and Puerto Ricans demanded open admissions at The City University of New York, so they too could take advantage of the very low tuition there. An evaluation conducted over the next thirty years revealed that while the new policy did not wipe out disadvantages due to race or class (or high school academic record), it more than doubled the proportion of black women who attained degrees, for instance.
In the case of high school, eventually, every state, and the nation as a whole, shouldered the responsibility of educating all children. With economic inequality on the rise, and low-income and middle-class Americans under pressure, this generation must meet the challenge of making one of the best ways out of poverty and into the middle class — a college education — affordable for all.
From Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, by Sara Goldrick-Rab, published by the University of Chicago Press. Copyright 2016 Sara Goldrick-Rab. All rights reserved.
