Thanks to skyrocketing tuition costs and cuts in state funding, the family income gap between families of public college and university students and the average American is growing closer to the family income gap that exists between private college and university students and the average American.
According to a report released last week by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program, entering freshman at four-year schools in 2005 came from families with a $74,000 parental median income. This is 60 percent higher than the national average of $46,326. In 1971, freshman came from families with a median income of $13,200, 46 percent higher than the then-national average of $9,028. This represents a 14 percent growth in financial disparity.
Victor Saenz, associate professor at University of California, Los Angles and co-author of the report, said the income gap between student families and "average" families is smaller when looking at families who send their children to public higher education institutions as opposed to private institutions.
Saenz noted, however, that public school income gap trends have "accelerated at a greater rate" over the past 40 years, meaning that the income gap at public colleges and universities is approaching the gap at private institutions.
"Nationally, college students are increasingly affluent compared to the general population," Saenz said.
José Luis Santos, UCLA assistant professor of education and co-author of the report, said the increased financial disparity is largely due to the purchasing power of Federal Pell Grants not keeping pace with inflation. He said another factor is the rate at which tuition, particularly at public schools, is increasing because of the decline in state appropriated funding proportionate to the costs associated with higher education.
Santos said the increasing cost of higher education "hurts" poor students and discourages them from applying to schools.
"The publics are beginning to look like privates," Santos said. "In my opinion, this is not a good policy."
The report, titled "American Freshman: Forty-Year Trends 1966-2006," is based on an analysis of an annual survey administered for the past 40 years by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA.
University President John T. Casteen, III stated in an e-mail that the University participates in the survey.
Casteen stated that the University is not becoming more of a private university; rather, the University will remain a public institution as long as it is owned by the Commonwealth, governed by Thomas Jefferson's statute of 1819 and run by a Board of Visitors that carries out the General Assembly's mandates.
Casteen added, however, "what is bad is that like several other states Virginia has stopped providing adequate funding for the education of in-state students."
According to a Board presentation on Thursday, the University's 2006-07 available academic division funds total $1,908.1 million. The largest percentage of funding, 27.3 percent, comes from tuition and fees, while general funds, or state funding, provide 13.8 percent.
According to Casteen, state funding for higher education has declined since 1990.
Between 1989 and 1990, the Commonwealth funded 26.2 percent of University expenditures. By 2000-01, state funding fell to 13.6 percent.
The presentation also showed that the 2006-07 state appropriation per in-state student (or Full Time Equivalent), which differs from the total cost of education for an in-state student, was $11,042. In comparison, the in-state FTE for the University of Michigan was $16,728, University of California, Berkeley's was $17,879 and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's was $23,165.
"What has happened is that Virginia, like some other states, has figured out that students and donors are willing to pay what the state used to pay," Casteen stated.
Santos, noting that future increases in tuition seem inevitable, said something must be done to increase access to higher education institutions.
"One idea might be to have sliding-scale tuition," Santos said.
Under this policy, tuition costs would be adjusted according to income.
Casteen's pointed out that despite rising tuition costs, the University is continuing to increase access through its financial aid program, AccessUVa.
"AccessUVa is an effort, successful so far, to protect students and their families against adverse effects of the tuition increases," he stated.
Prior to AccessUVa, the increases in tuition and the lowered levels of state funding "certainly" affected the socioeconomic diversity of the University," according to Casteen.
He added, however, "the pendulum has been moving in the other direction since the program began."
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