How to make college more accessible to low-income students? Get back to basics.
Last June the White House announced it “is taking swift action to support our Nation’s colleges and universities so they can continue building pathways to upward mobility and success for all students to thrive.” Like so many federal and state bureaucrats, not to mention college administrators, the president has talked a good game on making college more accessible for low-income students — all the while making it harder.
Take the news this week that the release of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, the form college students and applicants have to fill out in order to receive financial aid, has been delayed yet again and now won’t be available until after the point at which many colleges send out their admissions offers to students. Indeed, it may not go out until after the date students are usually asked to put down deposits. Some schools have extended their commitment deadlines but not enough to make much of a difference this year.
The result, according to The Wall Street Journal, is that “less than half the usual number of high-school students have applied for college financial aid so far this year.” And many will not be able to compare offers from schools before making their decisions. The bureaucrats at the Department of Education have been seemingly so busy trying to find unconstitutional ways to forgive student loan debt that they have made it more likely that current students will incur higher levels of debt or won’t be able to afford college at all.
The changes being made to the form will supposedly make it simpler. But, as economist Richard Vedder has pointed out, the entire form could be reduced to questions that fit on a postcard or eliminated entirely. If the IRS is already collecting all of your income information, what else do the feds really need?
But financial aid is hardly the only way leaders in education have made it more complicated for underprivileged students to apply to college. Take the widely adopted “test-optional” policy adopted by so many schools in recent years. Out of a misguided belief that standardized tests are inequitable and give a leg up to wealthy, white applicants, many colleges left it up to applicants to determine whether to send in scores.
Last summer I visited a good but hardly top-tier school with my daughter. The first information slide in the admissions presentation noted an average SAT score of 1510, while acknowledging that only 30 percent of students actually submitted scores. This decision of whether to send in scores has left wealthy and middle-class parents tearing their hair out: Should their student submit them if they are lower than the average, even if the average is only of a small percentage of applicants? How much lower a score would still get them in? It’s no surprise that a recent study by Dartmouth College found its test-optional policy resulted in lower-income kids withholding scores that would have helped them get in.
For all the faults of the old system, applying to college used to be a whole lot easier. Some basic personal information, a high school transcript, and some test scores used to be sufficient — even for elite institutions. Many required essays, but students were not expected to say anything particularly original or earth-shattering, and they hardly took on the importance they do today. Harvard’s
application from 1935, the year John F. Kennedy Jr. applied, ran to three pages including space for a handwritten essay.
Filling out college applications — which one might think would have become easier in the digital age — has become more time consuming. Students apply on average to many more colleges. And elite colleges now try to distinguish themselves with their essay requirements. They have multiple deadlines and different types of admission, including early action, early decision 1, and early decision 2.
Even the Common Application — which was originally implemented to connect students from more diverse socioeconomic backgrounds with colleges around the country by allowing them to fill out one form for multiple schools — is failing. Many schools that accept the Common App now often ask for “supplemental essays.”
Take the University of Texas at Austin, which, in addition to the Common Application or its own application, requires an additional three short answer essays and an optional fourth. (These extra essays often amount to requests for love letters to the college — explaining why you think this school, more than any other, will help you achieve your hopes and dreams.) Again, these are obstacles that some wealthy students with educated parents are stressing over. Imagine a first-generation applicant going to a big high school whose college counselor is also helping 200 other students. The most equitable solution is to add the essay section back to the SATs and have students submit only that to colleges. No parent or consultant will be able to rewrite it.
Financial aid is hardly the only way leaders in education have made it more complicated for underprivileged students to apply to college.
If colleges — and the education bureaucracy that purports to support them — want to get more socioeconomic diversity in higher education, they need to get back to basics. The alternatives will only give a leg up to students with the resources to manage this nonsense.