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“If college opportunities are restricted to those in the higher income brackets, the way is open to the creation and perpetuation of a class society which has no place in the American way of life.”
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“The democratic community cannot tolerate a society based upon education for the well-to-do alone,” the commissioners wrote in their final report. To achieve its recommendation to double collegegoing rates, it called on the federal government to create financial-assistance programs for needy students. In 1947, the President’s Commission on Higher Education, better known as the Truman Commission, said that sending more Americans to college should be a national priority. It was the era of the modern public university, with states like California and New York building up multicampus systems that promised unprecedented access to high-quality education, just in time for the baby-boom generation. The GI Bill opened the doors of college to millions of returning veterans. However, the idea came fully to the fore in the years following World War II. The charters of early private colleges often included scholarships for bright but needy students. Land-grant universities were founded with the notion of expanding access to education. The notion of higher education as equalizer isn’t a new one. In the years ahead, it could be completely broken. The higher-ed ladder to the middle class may be weak and wobbly now. Without change, the disparities could only deepen - according to one estimate,two-thirds of new job openings go to people with at least some education beyond high school. Poring over the vast amounts of economic and social-science data on the issue of mobility and identifying the structural issues that hamper it, it’s easy to become overwhelmed, to see the problem as insurmountable. Yet inequality in this country remains as entrenched as ever - a child born into poverty has less than a 10-percentchance of becoming an affluent adult. How can this be? If in Horatio Alger stories poor kids made good through a combination of grit and elbow grease, hitting the books was supposed to be the pass to the middle class in the 21st century. While college-graduation rates have soared over the past 50 years for middle- and upper-income Americans, for those with family incomes of $42,000 or less, they’ve barely budged. Less than 15 percent of students from the lowest socioeconomic bracket earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24, according to the U.S. “The only thing that mitigates intergenerational poverty is higher education,” says Danette Howard, senior vice president at the Lumina Foundation, which supports expanded college access.
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For those from wealthy families who start near the ladder’s top, the ascent is surer, but for the many who must begin at the bottom, it can be tough to scramble up. And if they do, they can easily lose their footing, leaving them saddled with student debt but no degree. Too often people can’t gain even the first toehold. Some of the rungs are missing others are splintered and weak. And the value went beyond dollars and cents - graduates were more likely to own their own homes, raise children in two-parent families, and live longer, healthier lives. A college degree helped guarantee a good job and financial security. For generations of Americans, higher education was a ladder - study hard and you could climb into the middle class.