Panelists said the United States has de-prioritized higher education and made a university education less accessible for lower classes at a Suffolk University forum held at Tremont Temple Baptist Church on Friday, titled “Reviving the American Dream: The Crisis of Access in Higher Education.”
Keynote speaker and Harper’s Magazine editor Lewis Lapham compared the current education crisis to Woodrow Wilson’s “propaganda” and policy. He said the Wilson administration supported a divided-class system where one group would receive a liberal education and another would be trained for difficult, manual tasks.
Lapham cited recent decreases in federal and state education funding for lower-income families. He added that a return to the former two-tiered educational system is one of the greatest threats to our national security.
He also said national security lies not in the strength of an army but in the “capacity of individuals to think for themselves.”
According to Lapham, the declining accessibility of higher education is no accident, but evidence American’s need to reevaluate its values. He said the United States should make the higher education system free like in Europe — which drew applause from the audience. He said the government is deliberately preventing the lower classes from receiving a first-rate education, explaining that an educated population is more apt to discover political wrongdoings.
“I can’t help but think the miserable result is the product of the miserable intent,” Lapham said.
Blenda Wilson, president and CEO of the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, said the challenge at hand “is to truly understand our history and the connection between education and democracy.”
Wilson said, as a recipient of a full-year scholarship from Cedar Crest College in Pennsylvania, she was taught that “if you work hard you, will get a scholarship.”
Yet, she denounced the practice of using merit scholarships to bribe not-so-needy students from attending better-ranked institutions. Wilson said many colleges have adopted this practice to achieve a highly qualified student body and improve their rankings in publications such as US News and World Report.
Currently, 59 percent of bachelor’s degrees go to the students of families from the top 25 percent income bracket, said Thomas Mortensen, a panelist and senior scholar at the Pell Institute. This distribution results from merit scholarships, which “turn need-based aid on its head,” by transferring rewards from the lower classes to the wealthy, he said.
The Pell Grants, which are given in approximately $4,000 awards, would need to be raised to $10,000 to cover the expenses that it covered years ago, Mortensen said, adding that “we have done a terrible job since 1980” of maintaining America as a land of opportunity.
The biggest factors influencing children’s educational success are their socioeconomic family status followed by their school’s socioeconomic status, according to a study Century Foundation Senior Fellow Richard Kahlenberg cited.
He suggested lower-income students could attend middle and upper class schools to increase their opportunities.
All panelists described the decrease in financial support for lower income students as a form of educational segregation, forcing them students to go to less expensive community colleges while middle- and upper-class students go to four-year public and private institutions.
Panelist Rodney Paige, the former U.S. secretary of education, argued for equal opportunity “born of fairness” and “a balance between nurture and rigor.”