Issues of Access and Affordability
Highlighted at Higher Education Conference
By Eleanor Lee Yates 

CHAPEL HILL, N.C.

For all the dour reports about the lack of access to U.S. higher education, there are just as many potential solutions tossed about. Some argue that need-based financial aid must be increased; others are convinced the K-12 system must be the engine for change. And many activists and scholars say accessibility won’t improve until policy-makers and voters recognize the unique needs of the nation’s low-income students.

Those ideas and more were all under discussion during “The Politics of Inclusion: Higher Education at a Crossroads,” a conference held last month at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. More than 150 federal and state policy-makers, foundation and business leaders, researchers and high-level educators from around the country attended the conference on college access and affordability.

Participants discussed appealing to university governing boards, state legislators, donors and voters to make higher education more accessible to the poor through student aid. They also discussed improving K-12 education, including partnering with low-performing schools, restructuring academic curriculums, offering “business plans” to boost low-performing schools’ performance and enrichment programs such as after-school business schools and college boot camp courses.

Keynote speaker Dr. James Moeser, chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill, noted the importance of such measures. While other countries have increased college attendance, growth in the United States has slowed. For most of the 1990s, the United States ranked last among 14 nations in raising college participation rates, with almost no increase during the last decade.

 “The new technologies, innovations and businesses in the 21st century will be created by highly-educated people, and as a country we are not doing enough,” Moeser said. He lauded college access programs like UNC’s noted Carolina Covenant, a program established several years ago that enables the neediest students to graduate debt-free by working 10-12 hours a week in a work-study program.