In Push for Diversity, Colleges Pay Attention to Socioeconomic Class

[MountainLaurel]

About time . . .

It's hard to spot one of the most underrepresented minority groups at many four-year colleges: students and faculty members from the working class.

Efforts to promote campus diversity have tended to gloss over them, focusing instead on members of racial and ethnic minority groups, whose presence or absence is easier to detect. What little research has been done on working-class students and academics—mainly small-scale, qualitative studies based heavily on interviews or personal essays—has found that they generally try to fit in rather than draw attention to their backgrounds.

Complicating discussions of such faculty members and students is the lack of a universal definition of what "working class" means. Although the term has typically been used to refer to people who earn a living through physical labor, it can also apply to white-collar workers with incomes below the mean.

Education policy makers often consider being part of the first generation of one's family to attend college as a rough proxy for having a working-class background. According to Education Department data, students with parents without any education beyond high school account for about 36 percent of all enrollment at postsecondary institutions, with most being concentrated at less-competitive four-year colleges, two-year colleges, and proprietary institutions.

http://chronicle.com/article/Socioeconomic-Class-Gains/124446/?key=TjogcF9rYSRFNn5rOj5CYDlda3ZgMU4kZXFKa3gsbl1cGA%3D%3D

[leftstreet]

1. Interesting article, but no mention of lowering education costs

A strange way to approach the issue of socioeconomic class...

[exboyfil]

2. It might be because grants seem to be in place to cover

most of the cost of the poor and lower middle class. The expectation that a family making $50K a year is going to pony up $20K/yr in savings and loans is a problem.

If you have a EFC of $1000 going to a state school (1 student in college with a family making $30K), you get a free grant ride. This means you do not have to worry about working or anything else. Just going to school for free. From $30K-$50K the financial responsibility increases until at about $50K it is all savings and loans (or merit money if you are so fortunate).

In general the grants are not tied to merit.