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This chapter focuses on the college-related experiences and practices of low-income Black students in elite private secondary schools. Like other groups in such schools, low-income Black students and their parents explicitly intend to use elite private schools for social and economic advancement. However, unlike privileged parents in both affluent public and elite privates who have consciously engaged the preparation and packaging of their children with an eye towards competitive college admissions since they were very young, low-income Black parents operate from a different structural location and accompanying set of perspectives. As data make clear, both parents and children conceptualize attendance at elite, private, secondary institutions as constituting an escape from poverty and a virtually guaranteed opportunity to enter the four-year (in contrast to two-year) postsecondary sector, a sector to which they do not see themselves as having access had they remained in under-resourced, predominantly Black and Latino urban public schools. In this chapter, we also highlight the unintended consequences of facially neutral policies and practices embedded within elite private schools.

This chapter discusses other major challenges to the U.S. higher education system: rising costs, online competition, and controversies over permissible speech. These challenges can be interpreted as problems of growth in the context of resource constraints. Cost problems were largely attributable to universities' requirements for sufficient revenues to support larger staffs and new responsibilities within the context of state disinvestment. Online competition was a result of the search for market alternatives to traditional, high-cost residential campuses within the context of an expanding system that included many low-income students. And the conflicts over speech were, in most cases, the by-product of tensions between students from comparatively privileged backgrounds and those from underrepresented groups.

Despite ample evidence that changes in net tuition do affect the college going decisions of students, there is scant evidence that increases in federal need-based financial aid actually have increased the college going rates of low-income students. This failure stems from the complexity of the system that determines eligibility for federal financial aid. Many have suggested simplifications of the system to make it more transparent. To stimulate discussion, this chapter suggests a more radical proposal, making federal financial aid an entitlement independent of income. This proposal is appealing because the most successful financial aid programs have been those with the simplest eligibility requirements. The chapter then compares and contrasts a dramatic simplification with the less radical proposals put forward by the Rethinking Student Aid Study Group and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. The chapter also discusses changes in federal student loan programs.

This chapter presents evidence on student perceptions of the economic benefits of college and the college application and financial aid process. It assesses the likely effectiveness of several policy responses aimed at reducing the gap in educational attainment between high- and low-income youths. The first hypothesis asserts that low-income students are relatively unlikely to attend college because they simply do not believe that it is profitable: they overestimate tuition, underestimate financial aid opportunities, and/or underestimate the market differential in wages for college versus high school graduates. Students in the Boston public schools and in a comparison (affluent) suburban school tend to overestimate tuition, but they also tend to overestimate the wage benefits of going to college. The second hypothesis asserts that low-income students are discouraged by the complexity of the process of applying for financial aid and college admissions, even if they are qualified and enthusiastic about going to college.

This chapter describes the ethical costs of upward mobility and presents an argument for why they are different from other costs that strivers face on their path. It argues that understanding the nature of the ethical goods move people well beyond the cost-benefit analysis that might be appropriate when thinking about money, time, or effort. The ethical costs of upward mobility are particular and not easily offset. Consequently, loss is felt keenly by those who succeed even if they ultimately have much to gain from the sacrifices they have made. The chapter emphasizes how people who are concerned with the challenges faced by first-generation and low-income college students often fail to appreciate the significance of the potential ethical costs that strivers encounter in pursuing a better life for themselves.

This chapter examines several court decisions pertaining to distributive justice and the school system in order to present a fuller portrait of the “Milliken” and “Marshallian” theories of democracy. It discusses two types of cases in particular. First, the chapter interprets cases involving race, especially segregation and voluntary pupil assignment, as confrontations between these two theories of democracy. Second, it provides a somewhat briefer treatment to the cases that arise out of the challenges to the states' public school funding schemes on behalf of low-income students.

This chapter focuses on educational equity in the world’s most affluent countries, where access to primary schooling is now universal and what is at stake is developing equitable secondary and tertiary schooling. In these countries, secondary school students from poorer backgrounds are less likely to achieve at the level necessary to advance to higher levels of education and more likely to drop out of school than their more affluent peers. Drawing on evidence from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), this chapter explores interventions at the individual, school and neighbourhood level that can keep youth from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds engaged in school, raise their achievement, and prepare them for higher education. It finds that there is not necessarily a trade-off between efficiency and equity: countries with high mean levels of performance are typically the ones in which the disparities between pupils are the smallest.

Charter schools are the most rapidly growing sector of schools of choice, expanding largely without regard to many of the civil rights safeguards connected with earlier types of school choice. This chapter focuses on the access to and in charter schools of students from different racial, class, and language groups. We find trends of increased segregation in charter schools and between traditional public and charter schools, as well as disturbing patterns of segregation overlapping with the absence of subsidized lunch programs and other factors that might stratify students. We describe financial, legal, and policy contexts that help explain these trends. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings and how policies might restore civil rights considerations into this rapidly expanding sector of school choice.