India's Parliament has amended the country's Constitution to impose admission quotas for lower castes and classes on nearly all private colleges that do not receive government aid.
A new report that compares colleges by how accessible they are to needy students is drawing the ire of private-college leaders and lobbyists. The report, released last week by the Lumina Foundation...
We need to focus more on the disadvantages that poor students face much earlier in their lives The proposal to fully subsidize tuition fees in all state universities and colleges (SUCs) is not as straightforward as it seems. On the one hand, proponents in Congress say that this will help improve the plight of “financially disadvantaged but deserving students.” After all, the Constitution states that the State shall provide “accessible” and “quality” education to all (see House Bill 5905 and Senate Bill 1304). On the other hand, critics say that subsidizing college tuitions will be fraught with many problems. Not only will it be inequitable (serving as a subsidy for rich students), but also distortive (inducing some rich students to shift into SUCs) and unsustainable (requiring enormous fiscal resources yearly). In this article we argue that, although well-intentioned, the free tuition policy alone cannot make SUCs significantly more accessible to poor students. Instead, we need to focus more on the disadvantages that poor students face much earlier in their lives. Inequality of access It’s true that poor students today have a harder time gaining access to education in SUCs. Figure 1 shows the distribution of college students across income groups, both in public and private colleges. The gray bars show that – as one would expect – students in private colleges are likelier to come from richer than poorer backgrounds. If public colleges were an “equalizer” of sorts, one would expect to see an opposite trend in SUCs: students there should be likelier to come from poorer backgrounds. But as the orange bars show, this is not the case: SUC students are likelier to come from the richest income group (17.2%) than the poorest income group (12%). The share of the poorest income group is particularly lower in Luzon (7.5%) and in NCR (just 2%). Simply put, the poorest students are underrepresented in our SUCs. Subsidy to the richest students The data above point to the glaring disparity between the rich and poor’s a