Abandoning the Mission at Public Universities

Public flagship universities and other top state colleges are spending nearly the same amount of their institutional financial aid dollars to try and lure in wealthier students as they are using to help fill the financial need of low-income and working-class students, according to a new report from Education Trust, a research and advocacy group.

The report, “Opportunity Adrift,” argues that by focusing on trying to compete for the “best and brightest” as well as the most affluent students, these heavily state-taxpayer subsidized institutions are becoming nearly impossible to distinguish from elite private colleges. This is certainly not what Congress had in mind in 1862 when it approved the Morrill Act, which provided federal land to states to create land-grant universities that would “promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.”

“Driven by commercial ranking systems that reward them more for who they exclude than for who they educate, and anxious to attract the out-of-state and other full-pay students who can help make up for declining state investments, public research-extensive universities [which include the flagships as well as nearly 60 other prominent state colleges] have become less and less representative of the high school graduates in their states,” the report states

The report’s authors found that in 2007, public research-extensive universities (which includes the flagships as well as more than 50 other prominent state universities) spent $761 million on so-called “merit aid” to students from families with annual incomes of more than $80,000, with a little less than half of that going to students from families making $115,000 or more. Comparatively, these institutions spent about $782 million on aid to students from families earning under $80,000, with the lowest income students (those from families earning $30,000 or less) receiving a little bit more than half of that amount.

While the report acknowledges that these institutions have boosted the size of the average grants that they provide to low-income students over the last four years, this hasn’t made much of a dent. That’s because these schools continue to increase their prices far faster than inflation and the average income of these families has declined over this period of time. As a result, the average amount of unmet need (what’s owed after all grant aid is taken into account) of students from families making $30,000 or less at these institutions now stands at about $10,500. Meanwhile, the report found that students from families making more than $115,000 have an average of about $17,500 in “overmet need.”

So it should not come as a surprise that the proportion of low-income students attending these schools declined between 2003 and 2007 from 14 percent to 13 percent; while the share of the highest income students increased from 27 to 30 percent. Similarly, the proportion of Pell Grant recipients at flagship universities dropped from about 22 percent in 2004 to around 20 percent in 2007.

Overall, the report finds that students from families making $115,000 or more per year are significantly overrepresented at public research-extensive universities — comprising 30 percent of the students at these institutions, but only 20 percent of college students overall. While students from families making $30,000 or less are underrepresented – making up 13 percent of student at these institutions, but 20 percent of college students altogether.

If anything, the current economic slump looks like it is driving flagship universities and other state colleges in the wrong direction — as many of them are seeking to attract ever-larger numbers of higher-paying out-of-state students who tend to come from more-affluent families to make up for declining state appropriations. According to a recent article in The New York Times, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, for instance, plans on doubling the number of students it takes from out of state to nearly 30 percent. Similarly, the University of Arizona “has granted a waiver on its out-of-state enrollment cap, to go as high as 40 percent,” the newspaper reports. Others, like Rutgers University, are holding the line for now but acknowledge that moving in this direction is very tempting.

For generations, public flagship universities offered students from low and moderate-income families with a portal to the middle class. Today such students are increasingly finding these institutions out of reach, as the schools lavish hundreds of millions of dollars on students who can afford to pay their own way. This is a national scandal and one that policymakers should keep in mind the next time the leaders of these institutions come seeking a bailout.