Getting Low-Income Students to Graduate
Top universities are good at getting students a degree.
How do we close the gap for those who attend less
selective schools?
Monica Potts
The American Prospect | web only
June 30, 2010 
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=getting_low_income_students_to_graduate


We tend to think of cost as the main barrier to college.
But were that the case, scholarships and financial aid
would bring in more low-income students. However,
according to research released last week by the Century
Foundation, 74 percent of students at the most selective
colleges in the country come from the top quartile of
family incomes, while only 3 percent come from the
poorest. Moreover, while about 60 percent of low-income
students enter a post-secondary program at some point,
only about 11 percent earn a degree.

Researchers from the Century Foundation use these facts
to argue for an affirmative-action program to get more
students from lower-income families to go to selective
schools. Their reasoning is clear: Graduates of top-tier
colleges have better access to career networks and earn
more throughout life. And schools like Harvard and Yale
also have extremely high graduation rates: Students who
go there are likely to finish.

Lower-income students are getting the message that they
should go to college, but not everyone will attend the
most selective colleges -- even with help. Regardless of
where they matriculate, low-income students need the
academic support that will allow them to earn a degree.

Elite colleges have the institutional support and the
incentives to keep students enrolled, whatever their
income level. In 2006, researchers at the Consortium on
Chicago School Research followed Chicago public school
graduates and found that students with a 3.5 grade point
average who went to the least selective four-year
colleges were half as likely to graduate as those who
went to more selective colleges. For example, 37 percent
of those who attended Chicago State University, a
popular choice for grads, were likely to graduate in six
years, while 72 percent of those with a 3.5 GPA who went
to Loyola University graduated in the same amount of
time. Research has already established that GPA is the
best predictor of success in college, so, all things
being equal, the graduation rates should have been the
same.

One would think the opposite is true: Schools with
reputations for being more academically rigorous must be
harder to stay in. While the Chicago students who
attended selective schools were less likely to graduate
in six years than those college's general populations,
they still did better than their Chicago peers who went
to less selective colleges. When the researchers looked
into why this was, they found that markers of
selectivity, like high mean SAT scores, didn't
themselves correlate to a greater likelihood of
graduating. Rather, it must be some other institutional
characteristic of selective schools -- one not
necessarily being measured -- that encourages students
to graduate.

Other studies show what that characteristic might be. A
new program at the University of North Carolina pairs
low-income students with faculty and peer mentors,
monitors their grades, and instills them with basic job-
hunting skills like business etiquette. Graduation rates
for program participants were 17 percent higher than for
students in the control group. Low-income students
simply need more resources, and that's as true for
students at the college level as it is for those in
elementary and high school. The kinds of schools most
likely to serve lower-income students, though, often
have the fewest resources. And state-level higher-
education funds are vulnerable as states shrink their
costs in a difficult budgetary environment.

In Washington state, another program shows why low-
income students don't finish college and what can be
done to help them reach a beneficial point in their
post-secondary careers. As Julie Strawn wrote in a
Prospect special report last year, the Integrated Basic
Education and Skills Training initiative found three
reasons low-income students don't finish. They tend to
lack confidence, be underprepared, and face higher
costs, not just for courses but because many need to
support families while attending school.

To address those concerns, community and technical
colleges receive state grants to pair academic classes
with classes that earn credentials, so that students
can, for example, receive basic literacy and math
instruction at the same time that they're working toward
a career. These schools also provide students with more
financial help and more intensive counseling. Students
who received the special grants graduated at higher
rates than regular Pell grant recipients and other low-
income students in the same programs.

Taken together, the research is an argument for flooding
resources into the kinds of colleges that lower-income
students attend in large numbers. It also helps explain
the Obama administration's $98 million initiative for
historically black colleges and universities and $12
billion plan for community colleges. High-achieving low-
income students would benefit by a system that helps
them get into better schools, but more average students,
whose white and wealthier counterparts do well by
comparison, would benefit from more colleges that
support them and refuse to let them drop out. Those
schools also can't cut the kind of mundane
administrative services -- processing financial-aid
claims and providing guidance counseling, for example --
that are often on the chopping block in lean economic
times.

_____________________________________________