How bad is the problem of college affordability for low-income students?
Nearly 40 years after Congress passed the Higher Education Act, low-income students are still much less likely to attend college than their wealthy or middle-class peers. Two-thirds of the nation’s wealthiest 25% of students enroll in a four-year college within two years of graduating from high school, but just one in five from the bottom 25% do so. And low-income students are virtually shut out of the nation’s most selective colleges: Among the top 146 colleges, 74% of students come from the richest economic quartile and just 3% from the poorest. In other words, you’re 25 times as likely to run into a rich kid as a poor kid on America’s elite campuses. Q: What about graduation rates? A: High-income students are more than six times as likely to graduate with a bachelor’s degree within five years than low-income students. Q: Is this a problem of inadequate financial aid? A: In large part. Financial aid funding hasn’t kept up with rising costs. In the mid-1970s, for example, the maximum
