Resize Text: 
Anyone can get into college. The challenge is staying in college.
—Sharita Porterfield, student
Cheyney University of Pennsylvania
As Harold Lasswell and his colleagues observed of the rhetoric of power (Language of Politics, 1965), some words become magic, with “inexplicable powers” attributed to them. “Access” has become such a word in the discourse of higher education. It’s a rallying cry, a totem, as we have been reminded since the beginning of 2007. In late January, the New America Foundation included “A College Access Contract” in its policy broadside “Ten Big Ideas for a New America.” In February, the annual meeting of the American Council on Education opened under the thematic banner of “The Access Imperative.” By March, the Congressional hopper had filled with three dozen pieces of proposed legislation affecting aspects of college-going that some call “access,” with grandiose titles such as “Graduate for a Better Future Act,” and the “America COMPETES Act.”
This concentrated concern should be set, however, in the context of the National Center for Education Statistics’ comprehensive accounting of higher-education enrollments: In 2004 (the most recent year for which data have been published) there were 14.7 million undergraduates and 2.6 million brand-new freshmen in American colleges and universities. That’s a lot of people who seem to have had “access.” So what’s the problem?
The problem partly lies in what we mean by “access.” The sloganistic use of the term implies that someone, somewhere, is preventing somebody from doing something in postsecondary education. But what is that “something”?
I’d like to offer four definitions of “access,” pick one that is most frequently assumed by both pundits and policy-makers, add another category that is related to access, then take the strongest national data set we have and show the size and nature of the problem we face.
I take this route because “access” is only one of three major thresholds for students’ postsecondary careers. The other two are establishing sufficient credits to lead toward a credential (sometimes called “participation” or “persistence”) and completion of that credential (sometimes called “success”). Between the first and second of these stages, the actors and their responsibilities change: Completing the requirements for a degree and ultimately graduating require that students accept a much higher level of responsibility than they do when they matriculate. (This essay will not address degree completion, since I’ve written a good deal about that in the Toolbox studies listed in “Resources.”) If we want to target our higher education populations more precisely and design smoother roads to completing credentials, our terms have to be a lot more accurate.
After 27 years of doing research for the U.S. Department of Education, Clifford Adelman recently left government to become a Senior Associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy.
Become a Subscriber