A is A – Jessie

A is A – Jessie assures me that most of our readers (all six of you) are much better educated than me (see what I mean?), and so you will recognize the title of this post as deriving from Aristotle’s version of formal logic. It means, she tells me, something on the order of “a thing equals itself,” or in my terms “it is what it is.” So what? Read on.

Two news stories yesterday provided unwitting affirmations of Aristotle’s wisdom.

1. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported (link requires subscription):

State-based merit-scholarship programs modeled after Georgia’s HOPE program mostly help students who would go to college anyway and do little to expand access to higher education for low-income and minority students, a new study concludes. The study, which was released Monday by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, largely confirms earlier criticisms of merit scholarships.

According to the influential analyst, Gary Orfield, in the Foreword to the Harvard report, merit aid is a key weapon in our society’s war against minorities and the poor. He writes:

We are in the midst of a destructive set of federal, state, and local changes in higher education policy that limit the ability of minority and low-income families to go to college, damage their future and the future of their communities, and sacrifice too much of the human potential of a society where soon half of all school age children will be non-white. . . .

Imagine someone reacting to higher education’s current situation by saying that what we needed were large new programs to subsidize white and middle- to upper-income students to attend college, and that it was not necessary to raise need-based aid even enough to cover new tuition increases. We would give some minority students entering awards because of their relatively high grade point averages from inferior segregated schools. However, we will take their aid away when they cannot get a “B” average in a vastly more competitive college setting and blame them for not being up to the task. . . . In cases where the financial aid made more students eager to go to a particular institution in the state, rather than an out-of-state school where they would have to pay tuition, the in-state institution could raise its selectivity ratings by excluding students with lower scores, students who would usually be minority and from less affluent families.

A policy such as this would make no educational sense. Yet this type of policy is now in place in more than a dozen states. Of course, no one intended to skew financial aid in these ways, but the broad-based merit aid scholarship programs states have adopted have produced these results. Although these programs stem from very popular, good ideas-rewarding the “best” students and keeping them in their state-their ultimate effects are of huge concern to those interested in the civil rights of underrepresented students. Genuine access to higher education for poor and minority students is as basic to civil rights today as access to high school was a half century ago.

This report, in short (well, no, it’s not short; it’s quite long), demonstrates, and demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt, that merit aid is … merit aid. It is not need-based aid. A is A. A is not B. Score one for Aristotle. (This is a sore subject with me, because Bryn Mawr prides itself on giving no merit aid.)

Update – See Steven Den Beste’s awe-inspiring post on the Harvard study here.

Update II – I had originally called this “A = A” and used that expression (is that an expression?) in the text, but Jessie tells me I should have said “A is A.” So I changed it. I always do what Jessie says.

2. Researchers at Florida State conducted a survey of over 10,000 students, according to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education (link requires subscription), and they discovered, as the article title puts it, that “Gender Gap in College May Be Traced to Attitudes During Junior High.”

More girls than boys in junior high school expect to attend college later, and the differing expectations of girls and boys contributes to the growing gender gap in college enrollments, according to a new survey by researchers at Florida State University….

John Reynolds, an assistant professor of sociology at Florida State and one of the researchers who did the study, said that race and social class remain the biggest factors that contribute to college-going rates of all students.

“But there is a small but significant correlation between college expectations and college enrollment,” he said. “To the extent that there is a gender gap in college expectations, I think we need to be paying closer attention to that.”

In other words (yes, but many more words), these intrepid researchers have discovered a correlation (“small but significant”) between a gender gap in middle school expectations of college enrollment and … a gender gap in college enrollment. A is A. Score two for Aristotle.