The federal government has a huge role to play in making college accessible academically and affordable financially. How about providing financial incentives to those institutions that are aggressively enrolling low-income students – the kind of students ever more present in the educational pipeline? What they should not do is impose spending rates on college endowments, as was proposed recently.
For example, my institution, Berea College, serves families with an average annual income of less than $30,000. Berea has robust Upward Bound and GEAR UP programs that reach more than 4,500 K-12 youth in five poor rural Kentucky counties. We provide bridge math, language, and other programs to help students gain access and succeed. And we offer full-tuition scholarships to all 1,500 students who attend Berea – 87 percent of whom are Pell-eligible – and require all students to work. But if we had to spend 5 percent of our endowment during the early 1990s, we would not have been able to survive the recession of 2000-2003. This is not the place for the Federal government to intervene.
I believe that access - understood as pre-college preparation, bridge academic programming, and sufficient financial aid - can be achieved, and without reducing educational opportunities for wealthy and middle-class families. But let us not mistake real access for needy families with the recent announcements of new scholarship programs at elite institutions.
Larry Shinn is president of Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, which has not charged tuition for more than 100 years.
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