Colleges reach out to poorer students
Critics question commitment to diversify
CAMBRIDGE - Williams College recruiter Elizabeth Tilley touted the elite liberal arts school's scenic campus and small classes, many of which are no bigger than the group of nine high school students gathered around a table at Prospect Hill Academy Charter School to hear her pitch.
But before long, Tilley turned to the elephant in the room: On a whiteboard, she wrote the price of a year at Williams - $50,000. Several students winced and groaned.
"Right, I see it on everyone's face. How are we supposed to pay for that," said Tilley, the college's assistant admissions director. "But with financial aid, it's possible." For students from low- and moderate-income families, she said, Williams waives nearly the entire cost.
"Duuude," senior Julian Baynes said, as a disbelieving smile crossed his face.
Tilley's recent visit to Prospect Hill, where two-thirds of the students qualify for free and reduced-cost school lunches, illustrates a growing push by top-tier colleges to recruit economically disadvantaged students. Using socioeconomic data to target promising candidates and flying in prospective students for campus visits, colleges say they are redoubling efforts to let students like Baynes know they can attend virtually for free.
Yet a host of education specialists question elite colleges' commitment to economic diversity, citing evidence that top colleges are becoming increasingly stratified by income. While they applaud colleges for expanding financial aid policies, even allowing students to attend without taking out loans, they say colleges must do more to puncture the perception that expensive private colleges are reserved for the wealthy.
"All the financial aid in the world doesn't do any good if the students aren't admitted," said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a nonprofit public policy institute based in New York. In a 2004 study, it found that three-quarters of students at top-tier colleges came from the wealthiest socioeconomic quarter, but just 3 percent from the bottom quarter.
Demographic shifts are raising the stakes around college recruiting. The ranks of high school graduates are expected to thin in the coming years and become more racially diverse, making it critical for colleges to create pipelines of talented minority students.
But economic disparities on college campuses appear to be deepening.
In 2005, 14.3 percent of undergraduates at the country's 75 wealthiest private colleges received federal Pell Grants, which are awarded to students from families with annual incomes below $40,000. Last year, 13.1 percent received the grants as a wide range of colleges - including Duke, Yale, Boston College, Boston University, and Tufts - reported declines, according to an analysis by The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The proportion of low-income students at public flagship campuses also dropped over that period.
Critics say such a statistic raises questions about the top colleges' nonprofit mission and their role as springboards for social mobility.
"It hollows out the American promise in so many ways," said Kati Haycock, president of The Education Trust, a national group working to improve college access for poor and minority students. "Colleges have to be more aggressive, because they could move the numbers [of low-income students] further and faster if they really worked at it."
Critics say colleges must ramp up recruitment efforts, award financial aid purely on need, and give low-income students preferences in admissions to offset social inequalities.
Low-income students often attend mediocre schools and score substantially lower on standardized tests, making it hard for even the brightest to match the admissions' qualifications of middle- and upper-class suburban students, they say.
But some education specialists say that there is no shortage of students from low-income backgrounds who can succeed academically at elite colleges, and that schools are overly reluctant to admit students who would lower their incoming class's average SAT score.
"It's going to hurt your profile and it's going to hurt your fund-raising long-term," said Jack Maguire, chairman of Maguire Associates, a higher-education consulting firm.
College administrators defend their recruiting and admissions practices. They say that finding qualified students from low-income backgrounds is difficult and that persuading them to enroll, given sharp competition among colleges, is harder still. Recruitment efforts take years to show gains, they add, and the perception of top colleges as hopelessly expensive is hard to shake.
"It's one of the great challenges we all face," said William Fitzsimmons, dean of admission and financial aid at Harvard University. "It's very tough sledding, because the opportunity structures for students are so different."
Harvard, along with Williams and Amherst College, is taking part in a College Board pilot program that provides detailed socioeconomic data to help colleges target prospective students from low-income neighborhoods.
Fitzsimmons said that financial aid policies and recruitment have nearly doubled the percentage of Harvard students receiving Pell Grants over the past four years, and that 60 percent of this year's freshman class is receiving grant aid, surpassing the previous record of 53 percent.
Still, almost three-quarters of the class comes from families making at least $80,000 a year.
"The danger is that you could have the best schools in the country increasingly populated by those who have the advantages," Fitzsimmons said. "It was pretty clear that Harvard and many of the top institutions in the country were beginning to become, rather than engines of opportunity, impediments to opportunity."
Amherst College has attracted more low-income students. It attributes the increase to ramped-up recruiting and the elimination of loans. That helped quiet the college's "screaming price tag" and many families' aversion to debt, said Katie Fretwell, admissions director.
On a recent visit to Lawrence High School, Fretwell passed out a one-page primer on financial aid showing that a family earning $45,000 would have to pay $1,750 annually, the bulk for books and personal expenses. Amherst costs about $50,000 a year.
Yet few colleges have the means to offer such generous packages, and all but the top low-income students wind up at schools that cost far more.
"How many of those schools are truly options to the masses?" asked Bob Giannino-Racine, executive director of ACCESS, a Boston nonprofit that provides financial aid counseling and scholarships to Boston students. "Except for the top academic performers, students are going to be left with tremendous gaps in financial aid."
As the financial crisis causes their endowments to drop, some colleges may be more inclined to reduce financial aid awards and steer that money toward wealthier students as an incentive to attend, many educators said.
"Students who have done well enough to get into schools like Williams have lots of options," said Theresa Urist, who directs college counseling at Prospect Hill. "But for students in the next level down, this is going to have a hideous ripple effect."
Urist said counselors tell students throughout high school that college is manageable with financial assistance and not to "shudder at the sticker price." But the cost still makes low-income students worry they'll be out of place.
With a Prospect Hill graduate now a student at Williams College, that school seems more within reach to some.
"Suddenly, it's not off-limits to them," Urist said. "They tell themselves, 'This can be mine.' " 