Commentary––

Should The Poor Go To College?

By William A. Collins

We need folks,

To cut our grass;

Not to go,

To history class.

Access to higher education for the poor represents an uncertain privilege here in Connecticut. From time to time the tide comes in, as with the historic surge in creating community colleges. Even now tuition, though climbing steeply, is still fairly reasonable in those schools. Construction at community colleges continues too, as the governor and General Assembly cheerfully issue bonds, which future administrations will have to pay off.

But operating budgets are a far different story. Since the tide of revenue has gone back out, those have been slashed. Tuition has thence zoomed, with precious little provision for students left stranded on the shore.

Unfortunately this current low tide in Connecticut funding is worsened by a parallel retreat in Washington. For decades “Pell Grants” (named for that far-sighted Rhode Island senator) have been the public transportation on which spunky low-income students rode up through college to the middle class. These grants have filled much the same role as the earlier GI Bill, only without the war. Now the president has nipped away at Pell, and plucky students by the thousands are back in the low-pay job pool. They’re supposed instead to finance college with tax credits, but being poor, most don’t qualify.

This shift away from boosting the poor (to boosting the middle class, who do qualify) may have been inevitable. The middle class, after all, does much better than the poor at voting and at contributing to political campaigns. Thus any administration that is more focused on conquest than on compassion is likely to seek its favor. But the double whammy of rising tuition and sinking grants is swiftly putting many needy students out on the street. It’s putting many others into deep debt as they try to borrow enough to keep on studying.

For conspiracy theorists, this scenario offers lots of red meat. Skeptics suspect that with our nation currently shipping buckets of its better jobs overseas, our policy makers may be wondering why we should spend so much money to guide still more poor kids through college. Look at all the grads who are either unemployed or working crummy jobs already. Why not offer high school grads those same crummy jobs without squandering all that cash on extra education? The service industries are always clamoring for more low-wage workers anyway, so let’s supply them without all the fuss of importing immigrants?

This is a paranoid view perhaps, but not totally off the mark. Consciously or not, state and federal aid have gradually been moving in just that perverse direction. For example, the $90 million recently lavished on the new UConn football stadium by alum lawmakers could instead have built a tidy trust fund for need-based student scholarships. That alternative wasn’t even discussed.

Sure, when revenue is booming there are goodies for everyone. It’s in the tight times like these that our true priorities emerge. And this year the top priority turned out to be protecting the rich from higher taxes. For college students, this decision led to higher tuition whether they could afford it or not.

Such a financial blow has in turn resulted in more former and potential students languishing as security guards, home health aides, retail clerks, day-care providers, hamburger flippers, lawn mowers, car washers, and other economic grease fittings on the engine of Nutmeg society. No one would suggest that this is purposeful public policy, but it certainly ends up as a convenient accidental result.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)