Higher Education in the News:

Today's New York Times contains an interesting editorial on the state of higher education in our state universities and colleges. It seems the haves are continuing to make out over the have nots, surprise, surprise:

The flagship schools compete for high-income, high-achieving students who would otherwise attend college elsewhere, while overlooking low-income students who are perfectly able to succeed at college but whose options are far more narrow.

In recent years, aid to students whose families earn over $100,000 has more than quadrupled at the public flagship and research universities. Incredibly, the average institutional grant to students from high-income families is actually larger than the average grant to low- or middle-income families.

Partly as a result, high-performing students from low-income groups are much less likely to attend college than their high-income counterparts — and are less likely to ever get four-year degrees if they do attend.

The big culprit is the failure of the government to adequately fund the Pell Grant system, which was intended as a bootstrap financial program for the working poor. Remember, it was the Republicans who ranted against social programs in favor of dumping trillions of dollars into the largest welfare program ever devised, the military industrial complex good old Ike warned us about.