For the past three years of my life as a public university educator, I've been wrestling with demographic, budget, and curriculum challenges. It's been pointed out to me and my colleagues-- repeatedly-- that American higher education is facing a demographic crisis. We will see decreasing numbers of relatively affluent, predominantly White suburban teens; and increasing numbers of poorer African-American and Hispanic students. I've tried to engage my colleagues in discussions about improving our institution's recruitment/retention of historically underrepresented populations.
I got the same reaction over and over: The colleague's gaze would go unfocused, then they'd make a broad statement about how we might better serve our international students. The pattern implied that, when confronted with the need to better serve domestic minority students, university educators may think "minority = lower standards" but recognize that it’s not polite to say that out loud. So they change the subject to something superficially similar but much safer.
Surely it's possible for American universities to serve historically underrepresented students without abandoning academic standards. Isn't it?
The diary title refers to Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, about the effective apartheid of public school funding based on local property taxes. Between 1988 and 1990, Kozol visited public schools in various cities around the United States. What he saw suggested that, in practice, Brown v. Board of Education may as well have never happened:
“In no school that I saw anywhere in the United States were nonwhite children in large numbers truly intermingled with white children.” (pg. 3)
There is no evidence suggesting that the structural inequalities along race and class lines so apparent in 1990 have improved in the last twenty years. If anything, No Child Left Behind has drawn even more funding away from the schools that need it most while fostering a teach-to-the-test approach unlikely to benefit students most at risk.
Structural inequalities in education play out a little differently when it comes to four-year colleges and universities. Higher education is not for everyone; colleges are supposed to serve an academically capable subset of high school graduates. Colleges with a reputation for academic excellence are supposed to serve an even smaller population of exceptionally academically talented students.
Peter Sacks' Liberal Education article titled "Tearing down the gates: Confronting the class divide in American education" takes apart the appearance of meritocracy associated with American higher education. He concludes that most of what we use to measure "quality" in higher education serves to perpetuate existing social inequalities.
The SAT has long been a tool for the intentional exclusion of unwanted classes and races....
Sacks notes that community colleges are supposed to be the great democratizing gateway to higher education, but few community college students ever go on to complete a bachelor’s degree.
Four-year colleges and universities serve as gatekeepers determining who gets the credentials and contacts associated with social mobility. Peter Sacks points out that ostensibly non-profit universities trade in prestige/quality, which is based on selectivity of admissions, which is based largely on standardized test scores. SAT and ACT scores aren’t particularly predictive of academic performance, he notes, but they do map onto family income very accurately. To top it off, "merit" based financial aid is also based largely on those test scores-- meaning that the students from the wealthiest households tend to get the most financial aid.
Higher education in America is about to run out of rich suburban White kids to recruit. How in the world are we going to keep this enterprise going, and how can we possibly make it a little less savage?