Louisiana’s middle class finally gets a glimpse of what NOLA parents and students go through
Why higher education is not a luxury
Students at Edna Carr High School in New Orleans celebrate graduation. Photo: Andre Perry
Gov. John Bel Edwards sent chills down the spines of Louisiana students and parents when he announced a $28 million funding cut in this year’s Taylor Opportunity Program for Students (TOPS) due to the state’s inability to finance the merit-based state scholarship beyond previously set aside “statutory dedication” money.
Louisiana’s economy is moving into a downturn even as much of the country picks up. While news that colleges and universities would absorb the TOPS funding shortfall palliated Louisianans’ anxieties for the moment, the idea that thousands of people would pay unexpected tuition bills next fall made parents and collegians justifiably feel as if the state placed a basic right beyond its citizens’ reach.
In other words, Louisiana’s middle class families just got a glimpse of what it feels like to be New Orleans public school parents.
Highlighting cuts to TOPS certainly raised the consciousness of the importance of financial access to higher education. But if Edwards’s tactic of using TOPS doomsday scenarios to attract scrutiny to Louisiana’s budget crisis has a greater utility, it is to make the middle class sympathetic to those in which higher education is perpetually out of reach.
Higher education isn’t a luxury.
High school graduation rates have risen over time, but the value of the degree has declined. In 2014 The Pew Research Center found that 22 percent of Americans with a high school diploma lived in poverty, compared with 7 percent of Baby Boomers who held a high school diploma in 1979, when they were in their late 20s and early 30s. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the median weekly earnings of someone holding a bachelors degree in 2014 is $1101 compared with $668 for those with just a high school diploma. The unemployment rate among those with a high school degree is 6 Louisiana’s middle class finally gets a glimpse of what NOLA parents and students go through - The Hechinger Report:
Why are many students with ‘A’ averages being barred from college-level classes?
Remediation is still the rule, despite research showing its limitations
If community colleges are going to be the new pathway to the middle class, they have a lot of work to do, according to a new study.
They offer degrees that can help low-income and first-generation students gain a foothold in an increasingly competitive job market, yet for years community college graduation rates have remained low. Despite research showing reforms that can improve those rates, most colleges haven’t put those changes in place, the new report shows.
For example, a recent wave of researchsuggests that placement exams are ineffective at judging whether students are ready for college-level work – yet 87 percent of community college students say they are still required to take these exams.
Even more striking, the report found that 40 percent of students who had an A average in high school were placed into remedial classes.
And while there is increasing evidence that remedial education courses act more as obstacles than gateways to graduation, the vast majority of colleges still adhere to that traditional model.
Still, “Expectations Meet Reality: The Underprepared Student and Community College” shows that some colleges have shown significant improvement using models that could be fairly easily replicated and don’t require loads more money.
“There’s been a lot of innovation, and sometimes it comes across as though things are really changing, but this report is really a reality check,” said Evelyn Waiwaiole, the director of the Center for Community College Student Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin, which produced the report and released it Tuesday.
Most students – 86 percent of the 70,000 surveyed – believed they were prepared for college when they first enrolled. Nonetheless, 67 percent tested into “developmental education” – remedial courses that students are required to take before they can enter college classes. Students don’t earn credits for most developmental education classes, but still have to pay for them, and they often eat Why are many students with ‘A’ averages being barred from college-level classes?