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A generation of heavily debt burdened college attendees calls into question the evaluation mechanism for potential students’ ability to have access to higher education. Wealth, as is commonly understood, is a far stronger indicator of financial viability than the one dimensional income factor. A deeper look into the wealth of an individual or family’s ability to support a student pursuing higher education will likely support a reduction in debt for future college graduates and an increase in students’ ability to qualify for federal grant funding.
The analysis found that family wealth – not just income – affects the likelihood that a student’s parents have saved for college, whether the student will enroll, whether they’ll take out student loans, and even how likely they are to graduate. And it identified a self-perpetuating cycle in which the nation’s pervasive racial wealth gap both contributes to and is exacerbated by disparities in higher education.
And the report argues that something can be done about it. Distributing federal financial aid dollars based on wealth and income, rather than income alone, could make for a fairer system, they wrote. The authors said more research is needed to determine exactly how the recommended process should be designed so that it minimizes the burden on the families it would be trying to help.
