Document Tag: inequality

Shifting Tides: The Evolution of Racial Inequality in Higher Education from the 1980s through the 2010s (2024)

Amid the proliferation of state-level bans on race-based affirmative action in higher education, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on June 29, 2023, dismantled race-conscious college admission policies, intensifying concerns about the persistence and potential increase of racial inequality in higher education. The authors analyze four restricted-use national survey datasets to investigate racial disparities in college attendance outcomes from the 1980s through the 2010s. Although college entrance rates increased for all racial groups, Black and Hispanic youth became increasingly less likely than their White peers to attend four-year selective colleges. In the 2010s cohort, Black and Hispanic youth were 8 and 7 percentage points, respectively, less likely than their White counterparts to secure admission to four-year selective colleges, even after controlling for parents’ income, education, and other family background variables. The findings underscore the urgent need for proactive policy interventions to address the widening racial inequality in attending selective postsecondary institutions.

Care(ful) Relationships Between Mothers and the Caregivers they Hire (2024)

Care(ful) Relationships between Mothers and the Caregivers They Hire offers an interdisciplinary and international approach to the complex issues of carework, primarily focusing on childcare. The diverse collection of authors center their examinations of care by interrogating how class, race, and gender interplay to create inequity and potential. The work shared in Care(ful) Relationships draws from various disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, media studies, literary and dramatic analysis, history, and women’ s studies while also addressing carework as it is depicted in ages past and contemporary culture. The collection not only seeks to challenge misconceptions and inequity but also examine how the unique personal relationships that form in the labor of care can yield prosocial change.

The Numbers Speak for Themselves: Using FAFSA Data to Secure Today’s Students’ Basic Needs (2024)

Postsecondary credentials are a good investment for individuals, families, and communities. Yet college is more expensive than ever and financial aid has not kept pace. And, as college costs continue to grow, students still need to meet their basic needs, such as food, housing, and child care. Ensuring students’ needs are met is critical to postsecondary success. Basic needs insecurity adversely affects students’ well-being, as well as their college persistence and completion. Research shows that food and housing insecurity are contributing factors to lower graduation rates.1 Higher education funding alone is not enough to meet those needs.
Today’s Pell Grant maximum award remains at a level similar to Fiscal Year (FY) 1978, after adjusting for inflation. In 2022-23, the maximum Pell Grant covered 63% of average published in-state tuition and fees and 30%
of average tuition, fees, room, and board at public four-year colleges and universities,2 while it covered more than three-quarters of those costs in 1975. States have also disinvested in higher education, all while federal student loan limits haven’t increased since 2008.
One solution is to ensure students access all available financial support, including means tested public benefits such as SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), subsidized health insurance, broadband assistance, and tax credits. Millions of college students are eligible for such benefits, however, they are unaware of their eligibility or do not know how to apply. For instance, roughly 2 million students who are eligible for SNAP do not participate, leaving around $3 billion in benefits on the table.4 The combination of need-based financial aid and enrollment in means-tested programs could help increase student graduation rates for students with low incomes who may be juggling a mix of work, school, and family responsibilities.

Populationwide Longevity and Food Insecurity (2024)

In this issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, we feature 2 articles that grapple with the important issues of life expectancy and longevity, particularly in vulnerable and disadvantaged populations.1,2 Although both articles come at the problem from different directions, their findings substantiate the need for broad policy solutions.

Variation in Community College Funding Levels (2023)

Funding for community colleges varies significantly, even within the same state. Several factors account for these differences, including more generous funding for smaller institutions to compensate for their higher costs per student, unequal local funding from property tax revenues, and political forces. In theory, this variation could lead to systemic inequities in funding levels by race, ethnicity, and economic status. Such inequities could arise if students from historically underserved groups are concentrated in community colleges that receive the lowest levels of funding from state and local appropriations. Our analysis finds no such consistent patterns across the nation but does find concerning patterns in a few states.

“I can’t learn when I’m hungry”: Responding to U.S. college student basic needs insecurity in pedagogy and practice (2023)

Food insecurity and other basic needs insecurities were pressing concerns for U.S. college students prior to the COVID-19 crisis and are even more so now. These issues disproportionately impact minoritized students, making addressing basic needs an issue of educational equity. As feminist teacher-scholars, we reflect in this essay on what it means to teach in the context of student basic needs insecurities, drawing on our experiences from launching an interdisciplinary initiative dedicated to combatting food insecurity on our campus. In doing so, we seek to catalyze changes within and beyond the classroom to better support students.

Integrating Systems of Power and Privilege in the Study of Resilience (2023)

Althoughcurrent approaches to the study of resilience acknowledge the role of context, rarely do those conceptualizations attend to societal systems and structures that include hierarchies of power and privilege -namely systems of racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism –nordo theyarticulate how these structural realities are embedded within individual experiences.We offer critiques of the current literature from this structural lens, using the concept of master narratives to articulate the incompleteand, at times, damaging story that the discipline of psychology has toldabout resilience. We then provide three models that center history, systems,and structures of society that can be employed in the study of resilience. We close with lessons learned from listening to those voices who have been marginalized by mainstream society, lessons that require us to redefine, broaden, and deepen our conceptualization of resilience