Public Universities Ramp Up Aid for the Wealthy, Leaving the Poor Behind | Jackson Free Press | Jackson, MS




This story appeared on ProPublica.




Epps, 19, was also needy.



"I did volunteering. I did internships. I did great in school. I was always good with people," said Epps, who has a broad smile and a cheerful manner. "I thought everything was going to go my way."

At first, it looked that way.



To attend her dream school, Lincoln University, Epps would have had to come up with about $4,000 per year, after maxing out on federal loans close to half of what her mother receives from Social Security. It was money her family didn't have, she said.


But many public universities, faced with their own financial shortfalls, are increasingly leaving low-income students behind including strivers like Epps.


A ProPublica analysis of new data from the U.S. Department of Education shows that from 1996 through 2012, public colleges and universities gave a declining portion of grants as measured by both the number of grants and the dollar amounts to students in the lowest quartile of family income. That trend has continued even though the recession hit those in lower income brackets the hardest.

Attention has long been focused on the lack of economic diversity at private colleges, especially at the most elite schools. What has been little discussed, by contrast, is how public universities, which enroll far more students, have gradually shifted their priorities and a growing portion of their aid dollars away from low-income students.

State schools are typically considered to offer the most affordable, accessible four-year education students can get. When those schools raise tuition and don't offer more aid, low-income students are often forced to decide not just which college to attend but whether they can afford to attend college at all.

"The most needy students are getting squeezed out," said Charles Reed, a former chancellor of the California State University system and of the State University System of Florida. "Need-based aid is extremely important to these students and their parents."




All of the school's own aid typically goes toward athletic or merit-based scholarships, regardless of students' needs. In the 2009-10 budget, for instance, most of the roughly $3 million in institutional aid went to four specific "merit-based" scholarships and the rest to athletics, international students, and study abroad, according to data supplied by Lincoln. The only need-based aid available to students is through separate donor-supported scholarships, some of which are earmarked for needy students, said university spokesman Eric Webb.


Data made available by the nonprofit Institute for College Access and Success show that 84 percent of the school's grant dollars in the 2009-10 school year did not go to meeting students' needs. (The data does not include athletic scholarships and certain other forms of aid.)


Why have public universities across the nation shifted their aid?

"For some schools, they're trying to climb to the top of the rankings. For other schools, it's more about revenue generation," said Don Hossler, a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Indiana University at Bloomington.

To achieve these goals, schools use their aid to draw wealthier students especially those from out of state, who will pay more in tuition or higher-achieving students, whose scores will give the colleges a boost in the rankings.




Despite its name, "merit aid isn't always going to the very best students," Hossler said. "It's an intentional strategy to help offset the loss of state support."




"When public [universities] come to us individually now, they won't admit it, but they're all looking for the same thing smart students who can pay," said an industry consultant who asked not to be named.

Another industry consultant, Mary Piccioli of Scannell and Kurz, said many of her firm's public-school clients are looking to use financial aid "to positively impact the bottom line."


"There's certainly some truth to that," said Donald Heller, dean of Michigan State University's College of Education, who has researched institutional-aid patterns extensively. "But I don't think that's really the motivating behavior for many institutions. The more dominant motivating behavior is interest in high-achieving students, which will help them with institutional prestige."

Epps, apparently, didn't generate that sort of interest.

She was in her high school's computer lab, checking her email, when she saw the message from Lincoln University laying out her financial aid package: a mix of state and federal money but nothing from Lincoln.

"Once I saw it, I knew it wasn't the amount that I needed," Epps said. "Right away I knew it."





But what Epps didn't know is that the school had committed to "continuously improving its SAT and GPA averages for incoming cohorts" as language found in a strategic planning document put it. She also didn't know that the school had been spending the majority of its financial aid on students who would help bring up those averages regardless of whether they needed the money.

"To attract top students to your institution, you have to be able to offer them a competitive scholarship package," said Lincoln University President Robert Jennings. "That's usually a full-tuition scholarship, that's a private room sometimes or laptop computer, or a whole bunch of other perks. That's what schools do. All schools do it."

Rather than giving small discounts to many students, as many colleges do, Lincoln focuses on giving free rides to top scorers 2013 as a Lincoln admissions flyer lays out.

The strategy seems to have worked. Lincoln University has raised its scores in recent years. In 2002, half of Lincoln's incoming freshmen scored between a 360 and 460 on the math section of the SAT. In 2012, half of students scored between 410 and 490.


"They wanted to increase the SAT averages of students coming to Lincoln," Jennings said.

And what about students who may have once been a natural fit but aren't hitting the higher scores? The school still wants to serve some of them "because of our historical mission," explained Jennings. But Lincoln has also increasingly been "trying to steer that lower tier of students students who need much more help into community colleges," he said.

Jennings doesn't see this as a departure from the school's mission to provide public access. "Absolutely not," he said. "That's why you have community colleges. They, too, are public institutions, and we have built collaborative relationships with them." He added that the school recently launched a campaign to raise more money for scholarships, some of which will go to providing more need-based aid.

Like Lincoln, both Millersville University and East Stroudsburg University the two other colleges that accepted Epps have created strategic planning documents that include language reflecting a desire to move up academically.

In a 2010-15 strategic planning document, East Stroudsburg University outlined the goals of becoming "more selective in each new year" as well as fostering "strategic alignment of financial aid" to better attract top students.

"High-achieving and access are not mutually exclusive," said spokeswoman Brenda Friday. "As such, we look for and recruit students who present both. We also recruit these groups separately. There are funding possibilities available for both groups of students."

East Stroudsburg and other regional public colleges are in a tough spot. Many don't have very much aid to give, and most serve a higher percentage of needy students than more prestigious public flagship universities, which have more money from endowments, research and fundraising. It's a common phenomenon in higher education 2013 students with less money relegated to institutions with less money.



"There have probably been no winners from all of this," Callan said. "But the biggest losers were those who were disadvantaged on the front end."


Though she loved high school, Epps said that looking back she realizes that despite her own efforts, she didn't get the best education.





But the SAT and other tests are still crucial to how publications such as U.S. News and World Report and Barron's formulate college rankings, which are widely regarded as measures of prestige.

Not surprisingly, colleges are constantly working to move up the lists. A prospective student flipping through Barron's 1995 college-rankings guide would have found about 90 public institutions in the top three tiers of competitiveness and more than 170 in the less competitive or non-competitive tiers. In the 2013 guide, that top tier has grown by more than 40 colleges about 46 percent and the bottom tier has shrunk by 60.



Schools might argue they are in a way.

Many state schools have in recent years struck what are called "articulation agreements" partnerships with community colleges that make it easier for community-college students to transfer to a four-year school. In the last two years, Lincoln University has established such agreements with 11 community colleges.

But even with improved transfer pathways, there's still an inherent risk for students like Epps who "undermatch," or don't attend the most selective school they can get into. Low-income, minority and first-generation students frequently undermatch, research shows, and in doing so, they often end up at institutions with less support and far lower graduation rates.

Without any aid from Lincoln or the other colleges that accepted her, Epps weighed her options and chose a different route. She recently completed her first year at the Community College of Philadelphia a school where about half of full-time freshmen don't return for a second year.

"In a way, four-year colleges are asking two-year colleges to do the dirty work of selecting who's worthy of a four-year college," the Pell Institute's Tom Mortenson said. In doing so, four-year colleges are not "taking on the responsibility from the beginning when they're freshmen and making a real commitment to these students."

But colleges even those with an explicit public mission have mounting incentives to avoid students like Epps. Carnevale points to the dawning of what's known as the "accountability movement" an effort by states to reform higher education by tying funding for public colleges to student outcomes and graduation rates. Last month, President Barack Obama announced that the federal government would also be moving in a similar direction and hopes to eventually tie federal aid to certain performance measures.

Unless policymakers build in some incentives to take on more students at the margins, the accountability movement could drive schools further away from low-income and minority populations, which have lower graduation rates overall, Carnevale said. "The whole logic of this industry and the reform of it as well excludes low-income and minority students."





Public universities have the task of "balancing institutional striving with the public's needs," Tandberg said, which "are often two very different things."





A year from now, she hopes to transfer, finally, to a four-year state school and eventually to get a bachelor's degree. She's thinking she might want to study accounting.

Jonathan Lin contributed research to this article.


LelandJr 4 years, 9 months ago

This is a big deal - we are moving in the wrong direction from an access to opportunity standpoint if access to higher education is becoming more and more difficult for the poor. The recent trends to move college courses online for free still has a ways to go to effect this trend.

I am proud to see that my alma mater is doing what it can: via the Ole Miss Opportunity Scholarship, the math for the poor in our state is Good Grades = Full Ride This isn't easy or inexpensive to pull off, but it's the role that we would want the flagship university to take on. This is a major long-term achievement for Chancellor Jones.

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