Sliding down the education ladder in that "hot economy"

By Lee Russ

Tuesday, November 21, 2006 at 03:21 PM

Get the feeling that your future prospects are starting to dim?  Considerably?

Say. you just might be a minority in one sense, or, if you believe me, a part of a coming majority.

The steep increases in college costs, the tightening of financial aid and student loans, and the stagnant or shrinking incomes of the bottom half of America present a 3-pronged attack on the ability of the non-affluent to go to college.  Even state colleges, which used to be the common American's answer to the financial, familial, and academic elitism of America's private colleges.

But, it's the 21st century, the compassionate conservative has been in office for 6 years, and....hey, look what the AP has to say:

Financial aid and recruiting policies are making public flagship universities less accessible to minorities, according to a national research group that gave the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill a D grade.
...
The report, issued Monday by the Education Trust, a national research group that studies classroom achievement of poor and minority students, painted a picture of increasingly elite public universities across the United States.

It said recruiting and financial aid policies boost rankings and benefit affluent students. But the policies also decrease educational opportunity as the number of poor and minority populations increase, said Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust and co-author of the report.

Boy, how long do you think it took the public universities highlighted in the report to decide that the report was methodologically flawed?  That's right, the claim was instantaneous with the release of the report.