UNITED STATES Inclusive higher education faces new threats in more unequal world

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UNITED STATES 

Inclusive higher education faces new threats in more unequal world

Anne MacLachlan19 August 2012 Issue No:235

Equity of access to post-secondary education for all groups in American society has been a focus of policy-makers in the United States since World War II. Target groups have changed over time from veterans just after the war, women, then African Americans and members of other minority groups. Participation has increased for all groups, but unevenly, so that minority groups are now known in higher education as ‘under-represented’ since their share of earned bachelor degrees is less than the representation of these groups in the total population. Women also remain under-represented in many fields of study and in higher degree programmes. Because of this unequal distribution, women and students of colour are still considered as non-traditional students and are all too often treated as outsiders. Current trends of increasing poverty, underfunding of primary and secondary education, and vitriolic attacks on higher education with drastic cuts in funding of public colleges and universities, are intensifying exclusion. Women and students of colour will not only remain non-traditional students, but ‘standing on the outside looking in’ at middle-class life as Mary Howard-Hamilton described it in the title of her compendium of studies on this phenomenon. Exclusion is increasing Today, increasing numbers of Americans are excluded from educational opportunity and related economic mobility as a result of decades of poor public policy and more recent polarising politics. Those most affected are women of all ethnicities, American blacks, Latinos and American Indians, the poorest groups in the United States whose wealth accumulation and standard of living has never achieved that of white men. Their poverty is sustained by low educational opportunities leading to low-paid employment. Increases in the educational level of the population generally since World War II and decades of expanding employment opportunities have not produced parity. Not only has uniform access to education never been achieved, access has declined since the 1980s. Certainly, patterns in earned bachelor degrees changed substantially between 1980 and 2008, the latest available data. A total of 934,800 degrees were conferred in 1980, compared to 1,563,069 in 2007-08. In 1980 white students earned 807,319 degrees or 86.4% of the total, declining to 71.8% in 2007-08, less than their 74.8% representation in the US population. Black students earned 60,673 degrees in 1980, 6.5% of the total; in 2007-08 they earned 152,457 degrees or 9.8% of the total, but they represent 13.6% of the US population. In 1980 hispanics earned 21,832 degrees, 2.3% of the total; in 2007-08 they earned 123,048 or 7.9% of the total. Hispanics are the second fastest growing population group, comprising around 14% of the total population, but earn a far smaller share of degrees. These inequalities persist despite 30 years of programmes to increase the number of black and hispanic graduates. Asians are an exception, earning 7% of all bachelor degrees though they make up only 5% of the total population. Racial-ethnic groups are increasingly difficult to classify, however, as there has been a 50% increase of children of mixed race under 18 years in the US since 2000. It is also possible to list oneself as more than one race on the US census forms and other official documents such as college registration. This makes exact tracking very difficult. Access programmes that work With growing complexities over definitions and increasing financial challenges, it is a good juncture at which to look at which of the programmes aimed at broadening participation in post-secondary education have actually worked. The most successful programmes are those providing financial assistance and academic support for disadvantaged students whether poor, inadequately prepared for college, or with a first language other than English. All of these programmes, such as the Pell Grants (free), the guaranteed student loan programme, and several other forms of financial aid including the Economic Opportunity Programme, have widened participation greatly. As far as is known the more focused affirmative action programmes such as the LS-AMP were also successful, but supported far fewer individuals. The population of qualified students of colour from disadvantaged backgrounds ready for college was small in the 1970s so, in a way, any increase in their participation is a win. But the programmes were usually created as part of the federal affirmative action initiative and funded by many federal agencies: NSF, Department of Education, Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy and so on. They require one or more faculty members to compete for funding through a complicated grant application process for a programme that may or may not be effective in broadening participation. Until recently, programmes created in the 1970s and later had virtually no evaluation of their effectiveness, no tracking of student participants, and no sense of the money and effort being well applied. That has only changed in the past few years, but even now there is no overall picture of the degree of success. For example, the NSF funds a 10-week summer research programme – Research Experience for Undergraduates, or REU – intended to increase the number of minorities in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) by enabling them to work with a senior scientist at a research university and become enthusiastic about pursuing a research PhD. There are currently more than 600 REU sites in the US in all disciplines but the humanities, with around 10 to 15 students in each. This programme was designed for students ‘under-represented in science’ (minorities and women) who are the first in their family to attend college, who attend an institution with few research facilities, and who have an interest in a science career. It is likely that the programme initially functioned as intended, but if so, there is no general documentation. Today the programme is being compromised by accepting students with educated parents; immigrants who look like African Americans but are, for example, Ethiopian, Nigerian, Trinidadian or from other parts of the world; as well as students from other research universities. Few are of the population originally intended. Reform needed from the bottom up If students of colour, women and the otherwise disadvantaged are to merge into the educational mainstream, the educational system that now ensures their non-traditional status needs reform from the bottom up. Success in secondary education today still depends very much on class and race. Schools are being re-segregated by the more affluent congregating in predominantly white neighbourhoods, while the poor and children of colour are left behind in inadequately funded schools. College access requires appropriate academic preparation that the 16,000 ‘poverty schools’ (schools defined as having 75% to100% of pupils on the free lunch programme) do not provide. The socio-economic environment and disconnect from middle-class life for those who may want to go to college may lead them into making college choices in which they are disproportionately likely to fail. Programmes created to assist such students have helped to foster success, but as part of the current polarisation of American politics, cuts in educational funding of all kinds are occurring. Those public colleges and universities enrolling more than 70% of all undergraduate students have had to reduce the number they can accommodate, cut majors and classes, raise tuition fees, end many student support and advisory services, and generally reduce academic quality as class size grows and more adjunct untenured faculty instruct those classes. Increasingly a college education is considered by a portion of the electorate, including many students, to be a workforce training exercise, not a place where students are exposed to many and new ideas, and taught to think analytically and to explore the fullness of intellectual endeavour. Deep structural problems The US led the world in broadening participation in post-secondary education after World War II, when college enrolment increased from 2,444,900 in 1950 to 18 million by 2009. Enrolment expanded from a small elite to a broad cross-section of the population. Higher education participation for the 18- to 24-year-old cohort rose to 69% in 2002, but has since dropped to 62%. Today colleges and universities enrol more than 50% women and more members than ever before of ethnic groups long excluded from mainstream higher education. While these numbers reflect a social revolution, the disproportion in participation by various groups and the increasing gap between white, black and hispanic degree acquisition point to deep structural problems. The gap between white and black bachelor attainment has risen from 12 percentage points in 1971 to 18 in 2009, with the white-hispanic gap increasing from 14 to 25 percentage points. Efforts to address these problems take many different forms, ranging from individual initiatives in schools and colleges, larger targeted programmes such as those privately funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the Seattle school district, state-wide initiatives through state departments of education, and a great many federally funded programmes. ‘Broadening participation’ is a current buzzword in US education at all levels, including many federal agencies. Of course, every activity that assists excluded students is to be applauded and every single student who is enabled to attend college and succeed there needs to be celebrated. Efforts by individual four-year institutions to bridge the gaps in access and persistence can often be successful and should be taken seriously. Retention efforts do not have to be expensive; it is more about creating an institution-wide approach in which faculty and staff are cooperatively working to bring about student achievement. Currently, however, it is unlikely that any individual programme or the huge multiplicity of programmes will succeed even in the middle term in ‘fixing’ the national problem of deep economic and social inequality that is the basis for uneven post-secondary participation. Broadening participation cannot be confined to educational initiatives, however well designed and funded. Nonetheless, there is a serious national effort at the level of the National Academies of Science and Engineering (NAS) to broaden participation. The focus is on the national scientific workforce keeping up with global standards by utilising all the talent of the US. The seriousness of concern is reflected in the title of their 2006 publication, Rising above the Gathering Storm: Energising and employing America for a brighter economic future. The NAS has conducted and published studies on bias, discrimination and unequal educational access with titles such as Beyond Bias and Barriers, focusing on women, and Expanding Under-represented Minority Participation: America’s science and technology talent at the crossroads. Execution of the recommendations in these studies is by federal agencies like the NSF, which has put great effort into analysing existing educational and training programmes. The approach is targeted at under-represented individuals, institutions and regions of the US. Many other federal agencies are similarly engaged. Yet the likelihood of these efforts being very successful even in the next decade is highly uncertain. Increasing numbers of young people of colour are not participating in post-secondary education or not participating successfully. Extensive gaps in high-school completion, poverty, rising college costs and changing financial aid policies work against success. These people of colour and women generally still face substantial bias and discrimination even when successful in enrolling in college. Perhaps even more disheartening is that federal programmes devolve to individuals to implement them, individuals who may hold their own biases and through them undermine the intent of the funded programmes they run. It is a general pattern to consider immigrants of colour as US minorities (see Harvard’s announcement of its ‘diverse’ entering class), admit them to programmes intended for US disadvantaged students, and derive satisfaction from their success in terms of having met the federal mandate. Immigrants are frequently highly motivated students and come from countries that may be poor but that may have excellent secondary education, and such students are in many ways more tractable than US students. If this misappropriation of broadening participation strategies was not already a source of deep concern, the current political landscape has allowed the appropriation of educational priorities by a deeply anti-intellectual section of the electorate. The result is the widespread disparagement of going to college at all, serious cutting of higher education funding in many states and at the federal level, and a climate actively hostile to the poor, minorities and women. It should be an anomaly in 21st century America that women and students of colour are still considered to be non-traditional students in some educational settings. Yet this is not likely to change in coming years. Truly broadening post-secondary participation requires a different vision of civil society, not a tacit acceptance of growing income and educational disparities. Inclusion flows from a principled commitment to equality and a willingness to work towards achieving it. * Anne MacLachlan is a senior researcher in the Center for Studies in Higher Education at University of California, Berkeley. This is an edited version of the paper “Women and Students of Colour as Non-traditional Students: The difficulties of inclusion in the United States”, published this month in the CSHE’s Research and Occasional Paper Series.