Striving for Educational Equity
June 18, 2010
WASHINGTON -- Six years after they were first published, the data that Anthony Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose produced showing that students from the lowest socioeconomic quartile of Americans were 25 times less likely than wealthy Americans to enroll in the most selective colleges have helped to reshape public policy around higher education. In addition to building the case for more federal and state financial support for students from low-income backgrounds, the numbers also helped prompt a group of highly selective public and private institutions to alter their admissions and financial aid policies and practices to focus more on low-income students.
One of those programs, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Carolina Covenant program, was celebrated Thursday at an event here at which the Century Foundation released a followup to the 2004 book -- America's Untapped Resource: Low-Income Students in Higher Education -- in which Carnevale's and Rose's original analysis appeared.
The new book, Rewarding Strivers: Helping Low-Income Students Succeed in College, includes one chapter on the Carolina Covenant, describing the progress that one highly selective university has made in transforming itself. As described by Edward B. Fiske, the program's initial results, in terms of low-income students' access to and success at North Carolina, are promising.
But that upbeat assessment is more or less overwhelmed by the book's new analysis from Carnevale, this time co-written with Jeff Strohl, who works with the economist at Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce. Their contribution to the volume edited by Century's Richard D. Kahlenberg argues that social, racial and ethnic stratification in higher education has actually increased in recent years, despite the fledgling efforts by the most elite colleges.
That's in large part because in the last decade and a half, more
