ESSAY
This article explores how higher education has come to reinforce inequality rather than
correcting it. The author, Suzanne Mettler, is a professor of government at Cornell University
and the author of “Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the
American Dream.” This article was originally published in The New York Times on March 1,
2014.
College, the Great Unleveler
By Suzanne Mettler
When the G.I. Bill of Rights of 1944 made colleges accessible to veterans regardless of
socioeconomic background, Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president of the University of
Chicago, worried that it would transform elite institutions into “educational hobo jungles.” But
the G.I. Bill was only the first of several federal student aid laws that, along with increasing state
investment in public universities and colleges, transformed American higher education over the
course of three decades from a bastion of privilege into a path toward the American dream.
Something else began to happen around 1980. College graduation rates kept soaring for
the affluent, but for those in the bottom half, a four-year degree is scarcely more attainable today
than it was in the 1970s. And because some colleges actually hinder social mobility, what
increasingly matters is not just whether you go to college but where.
The demise of opportunity through higher education is, fundamentally, a political failure.
Our landmark higher education policies have ceased to function effectively, and lawmakers —
consumed by partisan polarization and plutocracy — have neglected to maintain and update
them.
More Americans than ever enroll in college, but the graduates who emerge a few years
later indicate that instead of reducing inequality, our system of higher education reinforces it.
Three out of four adults who grow up in the top quarter of the income spectrum earn
baccalaureate degrees by age 24, but it’s only one out of three in the next quarter down. In the
bottom half of the economic distribution, it’s less than one out of five for those in the third
bracket and fewer than one out of 10 in the poorest.
That’s before we even begin differentiating by type of college. Higher education is
becoming a caste system, separate and unequal for students with different family incomes.
Where students attend college affects their chances of graduating and how indebted they will
become in the process.
Private nonprofits, schools like Stanford or Vassar, list the highest “sticker prices,” but
the average student pays less than half of full fare. Some nonprofits provide generous need-based
aid to low- and middle-income students, supplementing their federal aid. Others devote their
resources instead to merit-based aid, courting students with high SAT scores, typically from
higher-income backgrounds. These colleges rise in the rankings, but they also provide a
disadvantage to poorer students who would benefit from more need-based aid, who struggle
financially to stay enrolled and who take out more student loans to do so.
Nearly three-quarters of American college students attend public universities and
colleges, historically the nation’s primary channels to educational opportunity. These institutions
still offer the best bargain around, yet even there, tuition increases have bred inequality. For
those from the richest fifth, the annual cost of attending a public four-year college has inched up
from 6 percent of family income in 1971 to 9 percent in 2011. For everyone else, the change is
formidable. For those in the poorest fifth, costs at State U have skyrocketed from 42 percent of
family income to 114 percent.
The worst problems, though, occur at for-profit schools like those run by the Apollo
Group (which owns the University of Phoenix), the Education Management Corporation or
Corinthian Colleges. These schools cater to low-income students and veterans, but too often they
turn hopes for a better life into the despair of financial ruin.
Nearly all of their students take out loans to attend, and the amounts are staggering.
Among holders of bachelor’s degrees, 94 percent borrow. They take on median debt of $33,000
per student, compared with just $18,000 at the nonprofits and $22,000 at the publics. The for-
profit graduates have trouble finding jobs that pay enough to afford their debts, and 23 percent of
borrowers default within three years, compared with just 7 percent from nonprofits and 8 percent
from publics.
Just when having a highly educated citizenry is more important than ever, how could we
be failing so miserably at achieving it? It’s not as simple as politicians’ terminating laws or
gutting funding. Federal student aid has actually increased considerably since 2007. But
government has abdicated its leadership role.
First, federal student aid has become less effective in promoting opportunity. In the
1970s, the maximum Pell grants for low-income students covered nearly 80 percent of costs at
the average four-year public university, but by 2013-14 they covered just 31 percent. Presidents
beginning with Bill Clinton introduced costly new tax policies to help with tuition, but these
have failed to improve access for the less well off.
Second, state governments, burdened by the growing cost of Medicaid, K-12 education
and prisons, let higher education funding dwindle. Spending per full-time public student fell by
an average of 26 percent in real terms between 1990-91 and 2009-10. Besides raising tuition,
public colleges have had to squeeze resources at the schools themselves. For poorer students,
graduating becomes all the harder as class sizes grow, online courses proliferate and support
services are cut.
Third, Congress, by loosening regulations, permitted for-profit colleges to thrive on the
government’s dime. These schools, which enroll nearly a tenth of college students, use nearly a
quarter of federal student aid dollars allocated through Title IV of the Higher Education Act of
1965, and they account for nearly half of all student loan defaults. A 1998 rule allows them to
gain up to 90 percent of their revenues from Title IV alone — a figure that does not include their
substantial use of military education money. Even during the 2008 financial downturn, the top
publicly traded for-profits enjoyed growth. Their upper management and shareholders benefit at
the expense of American taxpayers and students.
Ordinary young Americans who hoped college could be their route to a better future are
the victims of a perfect storm of political winds. It began with existing public policies that
required routine maintenance being left to wither. As Nancy Kassebaum, a former Republican
senator from Kansas, told me, “Public programs, just like any other programs, need to be
managed.” She remembers when bipartisanship functioned well enough to do so on higher
education issues.
Now Congress is more polarized than at any point in modern history, and it’s not just
decisions on nominations and the debt ceiling that suffer. I examined votes on amendments to
higher education bills and found that between the 1970s and 1995-2008 the partisan split doubled
in the House and quadrupled in the Senate. Such division on minor adjustments to policies
indicates why Congress has failed to address larger issues.
That’s not the whole story, either. Plutocratic governance intensifies the dysfunction, as
powerful industries still have the strength to bring politicians together across the aisle in a parody
of true bipartisanship.
The effect of polarized plutocracy is epitomized by Congress’s support for the for-profit
colleges. By the late 1990s, Republican leaders championed the for-profits as the “private
sector,” never mind that 15 of the large publicly traded for-profits receive on average 86 percent
of their revenues from federal student aid. Plutocracy helped bring House Democrats onboard, as
the industry wooed them through strategic lobbying and campaign contributions. The result? In
the House of Representatives, where Democrats and Republicans agree on almost nothing, they
have united to protect $32 billion taxpayer dollars for the for-profit college industry.
Most of us were raised to believe that going to college was the surest path to a better life,
but for many today that belief can be perilous. Unless we can claw back polarization and
plutocracy enough to restore opportunity in higher education, the United States will become a
society in which rank is fixed and our ideal of upward mobility but a memory.