COLLEGE FOR THE POOR

...By the end of the 1960s students, mostly black, protested at innumerable urban universities such as City College, San Francisco State and Brandeis...

...for a private university some $5,000 per year...

...of 34 defined as "free access" institutions nearly all are public community colleges...

...Colin Greer in The Greta School Legend adduces evidence to show that the poor failed in the public schools...

...But the common school movement grew so that by the end of the nineteenth century over 40 percent of college students came from public schools...

...In order to qualify for a college education, they had to show merit...

...The tuition and living cost at a state university totals some $2,000-$2,500 per year...

...By and large, the overwhelming majority of the poor was not educated in the public schools...

...Nor did the private universities seek out the poor as students...

...The senior institutions, because of lack of facilities, were rejecting some 9 out of 10 applicants for admission...

...Those who most felt the burden of this urban educational neglect are the urban black poor...

...Other ways to speed up the education of the black poor would be to create entirely new forms of education...

...the Brooklyn Center of Long Island University revealed that freshman enrollments were down 40 percent for the first two years of open enrollment...

...Ten thousand dollars in 1926 signified affluence...

...Choice of college depended on a high school student's grade averages, thus guaranteeing those with higher avcrages places in the senior college of their choice...

...a decision the educational historian Frederick Rudolph estimates set back the movement for public universities some fifty years...

...Few public urban universities have attempted to grapple with the problem of educating an urban poor...

...Moreover, the open admissions plan failed to offer strong remedial and recruitment programs...

...These efforts, however, are merely piecemeal...

...Moreover, blacks are geographically removed from nearby free access, colleges...

...And, second, the chances are that the colleges would not accept him because of a competitive overflow of applicants which impels administrators to create artificial barriers screening out students...

...A major study of accessible higher education, Warren Willingham's Free Access Higher Education, disclosed a haphazard educational pattern which unconsciously neglects the urban poor...

...Yet free higher education should still remain our goal...

...A quota system, although politically improbable, presents one method...

...And the financial strains on the lower-middle-class youngster are also severe...

...Free tuition was a policy practiced by City University of New York and the California system...

...They demanded equality in urban universities...

...In reality it resembles most the harsh Calvinism of our Puritan forebears, which sanctified the status quo: the gifted and well-to-do who succeed possess an inner grace, whereas the less gifted and less affluent who fail were so destined...

...Harvard's President Charles Eliot felt that the carpenter's son should be a carpenter, and higher education was not meant for him...

...in practice only one-sixth transfer to four-year institutions...

...Moreover, one-fourth of all protestors' demands were for admitting more black students...

...A common complaint of educational reformers such as George Counts was that the public high school, intended for the poor, mainly helped the affluent...

...The dominant university, privately owned and controlled, sanctified meritocracy...

...We owe it to ourselves to make higher education accessible to the poor as well as to the more well-off in terms of manpower resources and social justice...

...In time, this negligence was bound to cause severe repercussion to the urban university...

...Nevertheless, as educational historian Lawrence Cremins notes, the public school movement still favored the affluent over the poor so that it never fulfilled its high aims...

...and 68 percent at Williams...

...Many who dropped out an estimated two-thirds did so in order to work, leaving college as an option mainly for the well-to-do...

...Both the public school movement in the 1800s and the urban universities which took on form with the urbanization of the 1920s did not directly administer to that clientele they were intended to serve...

...Some sentiment existed, to create people's colleges that would "teach the children of the poor to rise by their wisdom and merit into stations hitherto occupied by the rich...

...In its initial reactive period, the city entered the field of two-year community colleges and educational skill centers...

...We have yet to realize this goal...

...Approximately three-fourths of our major urban centers are markedly lacking in available colleges and universities that provide a measure of "free access" defined as an institution where it is relatively easy to be admitted and which maintains free or low-cost tuition...

...It conformed to national norms enrolling 57 percent of college age population in some form of higher education...

...In California, the pattern is the same...

...Initially, the urban university was an upper- and later a middle-class institution...

...However, it was not until February 28, 1966 that the Board of Higher Education of the City of New York decided to offer the "benefits of post-high school education to all residents of New York City who are able and eager to avail themselves of these benefits" the policy of open admissions establishing 1975 as the target date...

...The answer is complex, involving subtle and interacting forces of social background and education policy...

...Three of every four fathers of college students, Reynolds surveyed, were from the staunch bourgeois fields of proprietors, professional, managerial and agriculture...

...Nearly half of the parents of Yalemen (47 percent) earned upwards of $10,000...

...and Hester's NYU was so badly affected in enrollment that the university, caught in...

...College faculties would educate the sons and daughters of the rich into good citizens without concern for their academic potential...

...These might consist of experimental colleges geared to existing high-paying jobs and not bound by traditional credentialing involved in our present undergraduate and graduate schools...

...The public schools and the public municipal universities became the vehicles of social mobility for largely a working- and middle-class...

...Unfortunately, open admissions at CUNY have not overcome inequality...

...Historically, college was the preserve of a leisure class, without particular academic merit...

...Moreover, private universities strongly resisted the land grant movement mostly out of resentment of being left out of state and federal funding...

...all of which indicates how few of the lower-working-class and the poor were able to attend college...

...What was expected of open admissions did not come to pass...

...in 1964, the university's College Discovery Program and Demonstration Guidance Project was begun...

...Reynolds sampled a cross section of colleges and universities urban, rural, public and private and his findings starkly indicate that higher education almost wholly catered to an upper and middle-class...

...In 1870, 1.7 percent of college-age people were enrolled in institutions of higher learning...

...Some thirty years ago President Truman had appointed a special commission to study the problem of higher education and it came up with the recommendation that every youngster be guaranteed an education up until the 14th year two years of college...

...And according to an unpublished study of open admissions at Queens College by Susan Levine, many guidance counselors did not encourage black students a rise from 8.7 percent black and Puerto Rican students in 1969 to between 9 and 13 percent in 1971-72, approximately 1.5 times less than the average for all senior colleges...

...First, his family cannot afford to send him to college...

...America was not prepared to offer its urban citizens the university opportunities it could offer its agricultural residents...

...Thus, in the 19th century, American college presidents devised the scholarship scheme for bright poor youngsters as a means of entering the privileged academic groves...

...Few heads of families make the necessary $20,000 to maintain a minimal home with one wife and two teenage children...

...And more than 100 major cities have no such "free access" college...

...another random sample study of 87 white institutions reports only 3 percent black enrollment and only nine of these institutions with a "free access" admissions policy...

...And one year prior to the founding of City (College, out of a New York City population of a half million the only two colleges and private at that enrolled a grand total of 247 students...

...But for the most part these intentions came to little...

...The median income of the fathers of students was slightly over $3,000, and less than 3 percent of fathers of students earned less than $1,000...

...The severe economic retrenchment has halted the progress towards free universal higher education...

...In fact, the reverse happened: prospective middle-class students left the urban private universities to attend CUNY...

...The first demand of the black students was for quotas...

...By the turn of the 19th century less than 3 percent of New York City's half million pupils in public schools would graduate from high school...

...And the Supreme Court in 1819, in the famous Dartmouth College case, declared private universities to be beyond public control although they served public interests...

...Almost all "free -access" institutions are public community colleges £6 of the total 187 colleges in the state since only the top third high school graduates can be admitted to the senior colleges...

...All protagonists accepted the proposition that admissions could not be truly universal, and proposed versions of quota plans...

...in the first few years the largest occupation group of fathers was merchant...

...Twenty-eight percent had attended college (today, three out of five students are the first in their families to do so...

...It was not the egalitarian program one hoped...

...One can see how private colleges and universities futher stratified the society...

...neither the working poor, or later, a welfare poor were able to take advantage of these free schools...

...Harvard President Charles Eliot roundly condemned the new arrangement One can graphically conceive of how little universities educated the poor and lower-working-class by a rare study conducted by Ora Reynolds in the middle twenties...

...New York families that earn upwards of $15,000 send their children to state or private universities out of the city...

...California did away with free tuition approximately five years ago...

...Consequently, there was little direct relation between the urban common school and the urban private university, and the Western private academy and the land grant college...

...In 1847 when City College, the first unit of the City University of New York, was established, its stated goal was to bring the advantages of the best education of any school in our country within the reach of all the children in the city whose genius, capacity and desire of attainments are such as to render it reasonably certain that they may be made, and by such means would become, eminently useful to society...

...Those that do frequently have wives who work in order to raise the additional necessary capital to send children to the State University...

...John's University reported a 30 percent drop in enrollment the first year of open admissions...

...in Los Angeles, for example, substantially fewer blacks than whites live near a community college...

...According to a New York Times report, more of the top.students applied to CUNY rather than less...

...The alternatives for reducing inequality through education are few...

...The net result is clear: a large segment of our manpower resources goes untapped and festers, and the inequality gap increases...

...Only the affluent could afford (save the "charity students" on scholarship) to attend college...

...That was the first major step towards granting admission to students who were considered inadequately prepared for the academic rigors of a four-year college...

...they either failed or dropped out to work in an economy with many job openings for the dropout...

...In time, free college will be taken for granted as has public schooling at the elementary and secondary level...

...Only some 15 percent of the CUNY student body can be classified as poor with families earning under $6,000...

...For the poor black family on welfare or making less than $5,000, however, even that lifestyle appears abundant...

...And, it must be remembered, the quarrel at City College initially centered on quotas...

...And with the sentiment growing against free tuition and open admissions in these hard times there is less likelihood that the Truman recommendations may come to pass...

...The open admissions policy of New York's City University instituted five years ago guarantees a place to every graduating high school senior...

...That despite the fact that two-thirds of students enrolling in community colleges, according to Board of Higher Education figures, desire a four-year degree...

...Neither did it devalue the university and cause a mass exodus from the urban public universities to the urban private universities as such Cassandras as New York University's James Hester gloomily predicted...

...But the not-so-bright poor were never to be so fortunate as to join this Calvinistic elect...

...Due to poor recruitment and failure to provide satisfactory remediation, open admissions has not changed much for the better...

...Most, however, are from lower-middle-class homes averaging between $10,000 and $15,000...

...The urban public high school student who went on to the private urban university was primarily middle-class...

...Now that policy is being scrapped because of New York City's precarious financial position...

...55 percent at Washington and Lee...

...Other programs had been implemented since then College Bound, SEEK, 100 Scholars Program...

...And the community colleges are not located where they would be most advantageous to the urban population...

...Most of City's 19th century students were the sons of the middle-class: merchants, grocers, carpenters, physicians, lawyers and so on...

...The first free public municipal university, City College of New York, for example, extended educational opportunities to the emerging urban middle-class...

...This educational urban neglect is even pronounced in the two most education-minded states in the nation, New York and California...

...a financial squeeze had to go as far as to sell its uptown undergraduate campus to the state university...

...A major study of campus protests shows that one-third of all demonstrations were at urban universities in large cities with substantial poor, black populations...

...In order to be considered for admission to a senior college, a student first had to attain an 85 average and be in the top 36 percent of bis or her class...

...The meritocratic conception of education only superficially appears egalitarian...

...CUNY's goal has been broadened to include students not previously considered "college material...

...The plan did not establish a coordinated remedial policy directed from the top but left such a policy to the discretion of the individual colleges...

...But there are two major deterrents to explain why that average poor youngster cannot look forward to college...

...The poor, alas, were something else...

...Like California, most of the 8,500 new black students admitted in the first year were tracked into community colleges, whereas most of the 24,300 white, and largely Catholic middle-class freshmen were placed in the senior colleges...

...Consequently, it was the rare poor youngster who went on to City College...

...funds for.1 its lower- and middle-class workers...

...That prohibitive amount rules out the welfare and working-class poor...

...One study reports that only 2 percent of the undergraduate enrollment is black...

...Initially, the free common school movement began in urban centers in the Northeast before the Civil War, yet the land grant movement was strongest in the Middle West...

...Now approximately three out of every four New York high school graduates attend an institution of higher learning...

...The costs of college are so great that unions have taken some steps by creating scholarship Maurice R. berube teaches in the Urban Studies Department at Queens College, City University of New York...

...It is virtually impossible for the poor youngster to gain entrance to college...

...They could be small decentralized units constituting an ambulatory higher education component serving a wide area...

...Studies of black attendance at colleges starkly indicate the un-der-representation of blacks...

...Some of the incomes of parents of students in private colleges were staggering, even by today's income standards...

...One reason that the urban universities never educated an urban poor was that the public schools also failed in this respect...

...Now it seems that City University will have some form of tuition in the near future...

...By not helping the least able, meritocracy merely sanctions the results of a race that was fixed to begin with...

...In New York, with the most colleges, two out of three are private institutions...

...These same attitudes persevere today...

...There was a striking irony to this development...

...A few years ago New York was typical of other cities, despite its tuition-less university, in terms of educating its college-age population...