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In print | September 25, 2008

In recent decades, it seems to have become the mission of American institutions of higher education to incorporate lower-class students into the world of college education. Particularly at liberal arts colleges, administrators must work to present their schools as something more than an expensive, esoteric luxury.

The traditional exclusion of the lower class from the higher education process has created a chasm within American society: both occupationally and socially, there is a growing divide between those with post-secondary degrees and those without. The perennial question faced by the administrations of colleges and universities, including Swarthmore’s, is how to address this problem.

Fortunately, colleges and the government have become old hands at attacking this issue, and the proposed solutions to the exclusion problem have been as myriad as its root causes. To remedy systemic inequality of opportunity within some minority groups (which overwhelmingly correspond to lower economic classes), the Supreme Court sanctioned affirmative action in higher education in 1978. To make the prospect of attending private colleges and universities more appealing to first-generation and minority college students, many elite schools have extensive outreach programs, such as Swarthmore’s Discovery Weekend. And most importantly, to make college more affordable for low-income families, the federal government and educational institutions have collaborated to create a vast network of private and public financial aid and scholarship programs.

While not a panacea, these and other initiatives have served to at least begin the process of bridging the education gap between the American elite and the American under- and lower-classes. But between the unstated privilege of the upper class and the rightfully decried plight of the American poor is the next great problem of American higher education: the massive, largely ignored middle class.

Before we can address the middle class in the context of higher education, it’s necessary to define what, exactly, the middle class is. While the statistical median income (meaning, the income of the middle 20 percent of households in the United States) in 2005 was between $35,000 and $55,000, values ranging anywhere from $22,501 (the value which, in 2005, would put an individual just outside of the bottom 25 percent of households) to approximately $100,000 can justifiably be called “middle class.” This range would place about 70 percent of American households in the middle class.

Considering it represents such a vast majority of American households, the lack of attention received by middle class families in higher education is shocking. Even assuming that families with less than $55,000 in annual income (placing them outside the top half of households) will be covered substantially by financial aid, the $47,804 sum of Swarthmore’s tuition is daunting. Factor in the College’s own estimate of nearly $2,200 in other annual expenses, and attending Swarthmore becomes prohibitively expensive even for the relatively well off.

While only aggregate financial aid information is made available by the college, grouping together both the most and least well off students, the burden of Swarthmore tuition has not gone unnoticed on campus, with several familiar faces missing this semester for financial reasons and countless more shouldering the burden of massive commercial loans. And while The Phoenix is preparing an in-depth feature on the state of financial aid at Swarthmore, this problem is not restricted to our campus alone. Across the country, in the quest for socioeconomic diversity in higher education, the middle class has fallen to the wayside.

The problem is, as tuition rises faster than inflation (which, according to US News and World Report, it has done for as long as the College Board has made such data available), the changing cost of college disproportionately affects middle-class families. And particularly in light of the recent crackdown on easy credit, commercial loans are no longer a viable option in filling the gap between what families can realistically afford and what colleges demand in tuition.

With a 2007 endowment of $1,441,232,000, coming out to $966,631 per student during the 2007-2008 school year, Swarthmore has the ability to truly make higher education realistically accessible to all who seek it. Harvard College’s “Zero to 10 Percent Standard,” which ensures that families earning below $180,000 annually pay no more than 10 percent of their income to send their children to school is only a starting point. And Swarthmore’s endowment only ranks 50th in the nation. With this much money available, the excuse that it costs more to educate students than schools take in via tuition payments should fall on deaf ears.

Instead of constructing new multi-hundred-million dollar buildings, like the University of Pennsylvania is doing for its Annenberg Public Policy Center (already housed in a state of the art facility), schools should work to lower family responsibilities for tuition. When Penn is able to consider constructing an entirely new bridge over the Schuylkill River to better connect its campus to the rest of Philadelphia (a project whose scale is ambitious, even for a university with a $6.3 billion endowment), it should be evident that its administration has lost sight of its core social responsibilities.

More radically, for the first time in decades, colleges could actually lower their tuition. And if colleges are reluctant to open their coffers to middle-class families, then the federal government needs to obligate them to do so, wielding the threat of revoking schools’ tax benefits (ostensibly a reward for serving the public interest).

And speaking of federal involvement, the idea of making college tuition fully tax-deductible has been floating around Washington for decades. The time has come for it to come out of the shadows and make its way onto the legislative agenda. From politicians in Washington to administrators here at Swarthmore, making college affordable needs to be put front and center. For many middle-class families, there exists no other option.

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