Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Flagships Flunked on Access: "Flagships Flunked on Access

Nothing subtle about the title: “Engines of Inequality.” Public flagship universities do a generally poor job of enrolling and educating underrepresented minority students and those from low-income families, and actually regressed rather than made progress on those fronts from 1995 to 2004, the Education Trust argues in a report released Monday.

The report from Education Trust, a nonprofit group whose mission is advancing the interests of educationally disadvantaged students, grades 50 leading public universities and the group as a whole on their success (or, more often, their perceived lack of it) in enrolling low-income and minority students and in graduating minority students. The nonprofit group gave 4 of the 50 institutions an overall grade of B, while 14 received C’s, 25 earned D’s, and 7 were hit with F’s. (A listing of the institutions and their grades is in the table below.)

It particularly decries the growing tendency of elite public colleges to provide institutional financial aid based on academic merit than on students’ financial need. In the aggregate, the report shows, the 50 flagships increased the amount of institutional aid they gave to families with incomes over $100,000 by 406 percent from 1995 to 2003 (to $257.3 million from $50.8 million), while the amount for families earning under $20,000 actually declined and the amount for families earning $20,000 to $39,000 grew by 54 percent."