Three Case Studies on the Widening Achievement Gap 

In this sobering front-page New York Times article, Jason DeParle reports on three young women who were inseparable as high-school students in Galveston, Texas. They were determined, despite humble backgrounds and a high school named “academically unacceptable” by Texas state education officials, to be the first in their families to graduate from college. “I don’t want to work at Walmart,” said one of them. “We wanted to do something better with our lives.” 

With the support of Upward Bound, all three graduated from high school and at this point, their stories seemed to validate the American ideal of education as the great equalizer. One was headed for Emory University, another for Texas State University, the third to a local community college. “I felt like we were taking off, from one life to another,” said the first. “I felt like, ‘Here we go!’”

Four years later, their stories provide sad testimony to how difficult upward mobility is in an age of soaring inequality. “Not one of them has a four-year degree,” says DeParle. “Only one is still studying full time, and two have crushing debts.” The young woman quoted just above dropped out of  Emory and is working as a clerk in a furniture store. “Each showed the ability to do college work, even excel at it,” DeParle continues. “But the need to earn money brought one set of strains, campus alienation brought others, and ties to boyfriends not in school added complications. With little guidance from family or school officials, college became a leap that they braved without a safety net.”

As DeParle tells each young woman’s post-secondary story in depressing detail, these factors stand out:

• One chose an “under-matched” community college, graduated, but passed up an offer to attend a nearby four-year college.
• One missed opportunities to get a much better scholarship deal at Emory because she made errors in her application, and university officials refused to make a retroactive correction.
• The colleges they attended were expensive – there’s been a 60-percent increase in tuition and fees over the last two decades.
• Living in single-parent homes meant there were no fathers to get involved and help out. This may have made the young women more dependent on their boyfriends, some of whom were less than supportive.
• Despite the heroic efforts of a dedicated high-school counselor, the young women didn’t have anything approaching the level of support that most middle-class students have when applying to college and figuring out financial assistance.
• Two of the young women had to deal with crises at home; investing in education was seen as “selfish” by some family members.
• The young women had some ambivalence about rising above their social stratum and leaving Galveston.

These and other factors conspired to sabotage an upward trajectory that had seemed so promising four years earlier. All is not lost, but the news is not good.

 “The story of their lost footing is also the story of something larger,” concludes DeParle, “the growing role that education plays in preserving class divisions.” Thirty years ago, the difference in college graduation rates between well-off and poor Americans was 31 points; today it’s 45. While both groups have improved, the affluent improved much more rapidly, widening the gap. There’s also a wider income gap: a generation ago, Americans in the richest 90^th percentile had five times as much income as those in the 10^th percentile; now they have ten times as much. The extra resources at the upper end of the income continuum pay for enrichment programs, travel, college prep, SAT prep, and support applying to college.

“For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall” by Jason DeParle in The New York Times, Dec. 23, 2012 (p. 1, 28, 29), http://nyti.ms/UmzwHn 

From the Marshall Memo #465