Message From Government to the Harvards, Yales, Dukes, USCs etc: You Have Plenty of Money, Folks, You Are on Your Own

Why Does It Matter?  -  Here’s Why

Thanks to David Leonhart of the NYT we have a lot of information about how well colleges that target working class families are doing.  It turns out they are doing pretty well by their students.

An Upward Mobility Top 10

Colleges ranked by percent of students from the bottom fifth of the income distribution who end up in the top three-fifths.

1. New Jersey Institute of Technology	85%
2. Pace	82%
3. Cal State, Bakersfield	82%
4. University of California, Irvine	81%
5. Cal Poly Pomona	81%
6. Xavier of Louisiana	80%
7. Stony Brook	79%
8. San Jose State	79%
9. Baruch	79%
10. Cal State, Long Beach	78%

Limited to colleges with at least 500 students per class and at least 10 percent of class coming from bottom fifth of the income distribution.

Of course none of these schools have a big time sports program and at none of these schools is the football coach the highest paid employee.  Who are these students?

“Those college graduates have to come from somewhere, of course, and most of them are coming from campuses that look a lot less like Harvard or the University of Michigan than like City College or the University of Texas at El Paso. On these more typical campuses, students often work while they’re going to college. Some are military veterans, others learned English as a second language and others are in their mid-20s or 30s.”

This explains some of the reason that California, for example, is doing well despite high taxes which conservatives say should be killing the state.  California is investing in people, not stadiums.  But troubling is the decline in state support for these and other state colleges and universities.

“The research does come with one dark lining, however — one that should motivate anyone trying to think about how to affect government policy in the age of Donald Trump. The share of lower-income students at many public colleges has fallen somewhat over the last 15 years.

The reason is clear. State funding for higher education has plummeted. It’s down 18 percent per student, adjusted for inflation, since 2008, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The financial crisis pinched state budgets, and facing a pinch, some states decided education wasn’t a top priority.

“It’s really been a nightmare,” said Diana Natalicio, UTEP’s president and herself a first-generation college graduate. “The state does not recognize — and it’s not just in Texas — the importance that the investment in public education has for the economy and so many other things. Education was for me, and for many of the rest of us, the great opportunity creator.”

So there you go Trumpie, really want to make America better, invest in college education for those families who actually think you will do something to help them.  But you ain’t going to, are you.