Critical Issues In College Campuses

Students from racial and ethnic minorities and other first-generation college students have suffered most from these inadequacies. I believe other critical elements for college campuses are being more student- centered, focusing on a genuine concern for the needs and welfare of students rather than of the convenience of the institution, and/or the needs of faculty and staff. Preventative actions can be most effective through being proactive and addressing the needs of minor issues early on before blossoming into major problems. College campuses must be more diversified and have tailored or customized programs that meet the needs of different student subpopulations. A student should experience a comprehensive (holistic) approach that focuses
Among the troubling consequences of this worldwide educational divide is an inadequate pool of leaders possessing the myriad of skills required for societies to prosper— the cross-cultural knowledge and appreciation, high order analytical skills, and the ethical fortitude needed to respond to today’s global realities. The societies that will prosper in the 21st century will be those that effectively educate the greatest proportion of their population. Colleges and universities provide a wide array of public goods to society to help them prosper; most obvious is the generation of a well-educated citizenry, fully armed with the capacity to provide leadership for the future. Colleges and universities have an almost unique capacity in our country to level the highly unequal playing field created by the large gap between the rich and the poor. This paper describes problems with unequal college access, the social and structural challenges of preparing low-income students for college, and the strategies that successful programs have used to overcome those challenges for thousands of low-income students. The paper concludes with a call to action for organizations and institutions to support existing programs and to develop new college preparation initiatives for talented, low-income
There have been many advances in access to higher education because of the GI Bill, desegregation, and the increase in high school graduation rates from 42% in the 1950’s to over 80% in 2002. Nonetheless, obstacles to truly democratic access to education persist. Students from wealthy backgrounds are overrepresented at selective colleges and universities, while those from poorer homes (below median income) are rarely seen. In 2004 –2005 one-third of students at all four-year public and private colleges received Pell Grant aid. Yet only 13% of the undergraduates at the country’s 50 wealthiest (and most selective) private colleges were Pell Grant recipients. In 2004–2005 Pell Grant recipients comprised less than 10% of the student body at Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania. In the 146 most selective four-year colleges (defined in the 24th edition of Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges) students in the highest socioeconomic status quartile comprise 74% of the student population at colleges and universities, while students in the combined bottom two quartiles comprise only 10%; students in the bottom quartile alone comprise only 3%. Is this simply a question of not having students from lower income levels ready to study in such schools? The existing research suggests that there are, in fact,