Preserving the Ladder of Opportunity

Equity Week is coming to a close. We’ve covered how the marginalization of a field can further marginalize the students in it. We’ve heard about how instructional technique and curricular redesign can empower students in the classroom. And just this morning, we learned about an approach that boosts student success by addressing students’ economic barriers. 

In our first post this week, we highlighted the important role that community colleges, and developmental education in particular, have to play in creating equal opportunity. But the responsibility to pursue equitable policies and practices extends across the educational pipeline. On Tuesday, The New York Times ran an article about elite four-year colleges serving a disproportionately small number of low-income students. As evidence, the article looks at a Georgetown University study of the class of 2010 at the country’s 193 most selective colleges.  According to the study:

“As entering freshmen, only 15 percent of students came from the bottom half of the income distribution. Sixty-seven percent came from the highest-earning fourth of the distribution. These statistics mean that on many campuses affluent students outnumber middle-class students.”

These are dramatic statistics for a society that prizes equal opportunity and claims to be meritocratic. The article goes on to tell us about how one elite school is venturing to change these grim numbers.

Anthony Marx, president of Amherst College, has spent the past seven years trying to make his institution more economically diverse. In the process, he has made Amherst College a model of equity that the entire American education system should consider. In order to enroll more low-income students, Amherst has re-imagined their admission process and their financial aid and transfer policies. Now, nearly two-thirds of Amherst’s transfer students are from community colleges.

I’m going to close out equity week by returning to some words from the 1947 Truman Commission referenced in Tuesday’s post: “If the ladder of educational opportunity rises high at the doors of some youth and scarcely rises at all at the doors of others, while at the same time formal education is made a prerequisite to occupational and social advance, then education may become the means, not of eliminating race and class distinctions, but of deepening and solidifying them.” In light of the results of the above study, these somber words of warning from over 60 years ago seem almost prophetic. The American educational system, often viewed as the hallmark of social mobility, seems to be increasingly determined to preserve the status quo income distribution. Community colleges must continue to do their part to keep the door open to all students, and we must hope that equitable policies like those seen at Amherst will catch on.

Alyson Zandt is a Program Associate at MDC.