Grant: While it’s clear that a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will put you in a higher social class than one from Stark State Institute of Technology, a child’s future is often determined well before reaching college age. Wealthy parents vie for spots at prestigious preschools, so their kids get the best start.
Grant: While it’s clear that a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will put you in a higher social class than one from Stark State Institute of Technology, a child’s future is often determined well before reaching college age. Wealthy parents vie for spots at prestigious preschools, so their kids get the best start.
Grant: Students at the University School, a private high school in the Cleveland area, are already using sophisticated architectural software to figure out a science project…
Grant: While students at private high schools work in new laboratories, Debra Franklin, principal of East Clarke Elementary School in Cleveland, says they just want decent lavatories…
Franklin: It’s unfair that the children come from the third floor, come from the old building, through the tunnel, and down to the basement to use the lavatory. It’s unfair that my kindergarteners travel from that lunchroom… If one of them has to go to the lavatory when they’re sitting in that lunchroom, I’m afraid to let them come through that tunnel and over here in the basement by themselves.
Grant: Education writer Peter Sacks says the complex barriers facing poor high school kids were made clear to him when he recently spoke with the father of one aspiring university student…
Sacks: He didn’t even know what a grade point average was, okay? He hasn’t got a clue what an SAT is. This individual probably isn’t even aware that his daughter will be excluded from many opportunities just because he himself isn’t aware of what opportunities might be available for his daughter.
Grant: Author Bell Hooks is well known for her writings on class issues. Her parents didn’t want her to take a full scholarship to Stanford University because she says they didn’t understand what it meant to go to a top school. All they could see were the costs of sending her to California from Kentucky. Maria Boss, head of the Cleveland Scholarship Program, says that’s a common problem for poor students…
Boss: These are the children, which happens also in the city of Cleveland, whose parents quite often discourage them from obtaining an education. Because these are working children, these are kids who contribute to the family income. These are kids who may be bringing home $6-7,000 a year.
Grant: If a teenager goes to college, poor families lose more than just their income and help around the house. They may also have to shell out what little money they have for tuition—much more money now than in years past. On the other end of the spectrum, students whose families can afford private or top public high schools have more than just wealthy, well-connected parents. Peter Sacks says they also have guidance counselors that know how to get them into top colleges…
Sacks: And there’s essentially these back channel slotting operations where highly-connected students from highly-connected schools have certain privileges in terms of information, access and programs that give them a systematic leg up in the admissions process that are not available to people of lower economic and social means.
Grant: Author Marion Nestle spent a decade running an admissions program at a prestigious medical school in California.
Nestle: As I was always fond of saying, the applications of the ones who would be admitted were so obvious that the secretaries could tell who was going to be admitted when the applications came across their desks…
Grant: Nestle says anyone could plainly see which students knew to fill in all the spaces available to answer an essay question on the application form. Which students answered the implied essay questions being asked. And which recommendation letters talked about the student’s research topics, not their techniques…
Nestle: It looked like a distinguished somebody who was a real researcher from somebody who didn’t understand what research was about. But I saw that as a class issue. I thought if you were someone who went to Yale or Harvard or an Ivy League school, your professors, at every stage of the way in your progression through that undergraduate college, would teach you how the game was played. And if you went to some state college in some mid-western state, maybe, in some rural area, where the professors weren’t as sophisticated and didn’t get research grants and didn’t know how the game was played to the same extent, you wouldn’t know how to play it. Even if you were just as smart.
Grant: There was an effort to help minority and poor students get into the medical school.
Nestle: They were looking for things like stick-to-it-tiveness and the ability to complete projects. And also things like, if they were from minority groups, ability to get along in white institutions…was something that they were looking for. “Can you do that without being so angry all of the time that you can’t function?”
Grant: Most private schools won’t talk publicly about their admissions policies. Case Western Reserve University declined an interview for this story, saying it was not in their best interest to discuss it. Today, less money is going to help poor students afford higher education than in the past. Grants and scholarships are often awarded based on academic merit rather than financial need. Author Peter Sacks…
Sacks: That’s, I think, a very disturbing development, because when you look at the demographics of the people who get these so-called “merit” scholarships, they go to kids who would have had the money to go anyway, and it is further exacerbating this class divide.
Grant: Sacks says kids from higher income families nearly always do better on college entrance exams, so they’re getting the scholarships. Will Doyle is with the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, a non-partisan organization that’s been studying this trend…
Doyle: In Georgia, they talk about it as the “new car” grant. A student, who might have gone to a private institution out of state, instead chooses to go to an institution in Georgia on a Hope scholarship and their parents buy them a new car. So, was that the best use of state funds? Probably not.
Grant: Doyle says college is becoming a necessity to live a middle-class lifestyle, but many poor people are being priced out. They’re losing scholarship dollars to the middle class. Money for federal Pell grants, which are based on financial need, is frozen. And tuitions around the nation are skyrocketing. The average tuition at Ohio’s public four-year institutions jumped 17% in the last two years. Maria Boss at the Cleveland Scholarship Program is worried where this will lead…
Boss: Basically, what we are creating is a two-class system. Eventually, if it continues, we will be creating a system for those who can afford to go and those that cannot afford to pay.
Grant: Lindsay Parker’s family didn’t have much money to send her to college, but with the help of grants and loans, she’s now a sophomore at Baldwin-Wallace, a private college in Berea. It costs about $24,000 for tuition. Her roommate is Amy Haskins. Amy’s parents attended college and her dad has a professional career.
Parker: We’re a lot alike. It’s so weird how we’re so much alike. Almost identical…it’s so scary.
Grant: But their backgrounds are so different. Lindsay says she grew up in a poor neighborhood. Amy comes from an upper middle class neighborhood in New York…
Haskins: Mostly everybody knew everybody. Everyone was involved and all the mothers and the fathers were involved in the kids’ sports and things like that.
Parker: I don’t want to say “ghetto,” because it’s not ghetto. We had one of the bigger houses and next to us were all of these little houses and the side street houses were falling apart…
Haskins: A lot of the families just had the father work and the mother was a stay home mom. And a lot of people’s fathers were doctors or lawyers or something like that.
Parker: Some of the houses were empty by us. So, that’s how the neighborhood was. People would be out at all hours making noises on the street…
Haskins: I would say that probably 96-97% of all the kids from my high school went on to some kind of college.
Grant: Amy’s family background means she’s probably much better prepared to succeed in college and in her career. If Lindsay is going to be equally successful, she’ll have a lot of catching up to do.
—Julie Grant
WKSU News
