HOME WORK

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Home Work

Introduction

Socioeconomic status has very real effects on student access and success in higher education. Several recent reports have underscored the challenges facing low-income and working-class students, providing useful data for advocates of class-attentive policies and practices. Authors Jennifer Engle and Colleen O'Brien examined fourteen public institutions that serve high numbers of low-income students to determine what practices best support student retention. Their report provides several recommendations for institutions, states, and the federal government to improve graduation rates for low-income students. Engle and O'Brien identify common features of institutions with higher graduation rates (including high levels of student involvement and special programs for at-risk students), as well as barriers to taking advantage of support programs (such as cost and students' limited awareness of opportunities). They dispute the idea that “excellence” and “access” are mutually exclusive and encourage institutions to recommit themselves to serving the public (Adams, 2000).

Explain what types of mistakes were made and why they are so critical in terms of research.

Researchers examine the effects of Texas's “Top 10 Percent Law,” passed in response to bans on affirmative action and in effect since 1998. The law has aimed to increase diversity at Texas's public colleges by guaranteeing admission to the top ten percent of graduating seniors from each high school, thus opening the gates to students at low-income-serving high schools. Examining application rates at the state's flagship institutions, Koffman and Tienda find that despite the admissions guarantee, students from low-resource high schools remain significantly less likely to apply than their more affluent peers. The authors stress the need to encourage low-income students, who frequently lack support or information about the application process, to apply to college (Andersen, 2001).

In this March 2008 occasional paper for the University of California-Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education, author Steve Chatman takes up the Supreme Court's implied challenge in Grutter v. Bollinger to more clearly substantiate a “compelling interest” in the educational benefits of diversity. Using a survey of students in the University of California system, Chatman illustrates that at the University of California (one of the most diverse higher education systems in the country), over 40 percent of students report developing greater understanding of others through interactions with those unlike themselves. Analysis by socioeconomic status shows that poor and wealthy students are more likely than middle-class students to report interactions with those outside of their socioeconomic class, and low-income students are least likely of all socioeconomic groups to report feeling a sense of belonging (Andersen, 2001).

Postsecondary Education Opportunity's June 2008 issue examines educational opportunity by socioeconomic income quartile and finds that students in the upper income quartile earn more than 50 percent of bachelor's degrees awarded by age twenty-four. In fact, students in the upper quartile have a 72 percent chance of earning a bachelor's degree by age twenty-four, compared with only a 10 percent chance for students in the lowest quartile. The newsletter breaks down attainment rates by quartile from high school graduation through bachelor's attainment, challenging the ...