The racial gaps among Americans who have college degrees have hardly budged since 1995
Morris Heights, a poor neighbourhood in the Bronx where violence was omnipresent, Joel Cabrera thought his future would be either “death or jail, because that’s what the outcomes are here”. Middle school was like “a juvenile-detention facility”. High school did not interest him enough to finish. Had he stopped there, he would have faced a life on the edge of penury. Among high-school dropouts nationwide, average earnings are only $600 a week.
In New York the average cost of the additional supports amount to $3,500 per student. But such schemes benefit college finances too, by increasing their revenue. Georgia State University’s programme to provide micro-grants, which began in 2012, seemed to boost both graduation rates and university finances. “That’s actually a big driver of this completion movement [because] enrolments are not going up,” says Patrick Methvin of the Gates Foundation, which has funded research in the field.
More evidence is accumulating to show that the approach works beyond New York. Starting in 2015, three community colleges in Ohio imported the, a research outfit, found it nearly doubled the chances of completing degrees . Two community colleges in West Virginia are set to try the system next.
This well-tested, cost-effective scheme has largely escaped national attention. To many, the whole question of equity in American universities can be reduced simply to the racial make-up of the Ivy League institutions. Besides ignoring the incomes of students at those colleges, who tend to be rich whatever their race and colour, this also assigns central importance to the controversial affirmative-action policies of highly selective universities.
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