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The reason that we as a society should aim to produce more college degrees for young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds is that we want a better life for them and their children, and we want a better nation and world for all of us. The desired outcome is not sheepskins or students’ scores on exams but the boost that college students can get toward achieving their potential.
College—whether with a vocational or liberal-arts bent—gives students an opportunity to test areas of interest, to follow their passions, or perhaps to find passions that they didn’t know they had. Higher education has been a success story in America partly because we do not know where the pathways that college offers will lead each student. A good college education builds specific skills, but it also provides graduates with some momentum toward a good future as participants in the economy, as citizens, as future parents, and as neighbors.
The question for the nation is how to provide college “opportunity” more broadly. That means a system that makes it possible for students—rich or poor, black or white—to identify the type of institution that fits their needs and interests best, to choose a course of study, and to give it the old college try. In the ideal system, the barrier of affordability is removed or at least substantially lowered so that students of all backgrounds have meaningful choices about whether and where they go to college.
Robert Shireman, president of the Institute for College Access and Success, has advised foundations and nonprofits on improving higher education and worked on President Barack Obama’s transition team and for President Bill Clinton and Senator Paul Simon. He is currently serving as a temporary consultant and senior advisor to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. This paper was originally prepared for a discussion on college affordability at the Ford Foundation on August 8, 2008.
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