With college attendance at record highs and the need for a college degree to enter most middle-class jobs, income disparity is becoming more apparent, especially in relation to education.
According to Sara Goldrick-Rab, assistant professor of educational policy studies and sociology, these differences in income are known as socioeconomic gaps and exist ""any time we see differences in students from different backgrounds.""
Why is this a problem? Goldrick-Rab said, ""Kids who come from families with more money enter college at much higher rates."" She also noted other factors in a person's decision to go to college, such as parental education and occupation.
These socioeconomic gaps affect people in two different ways. First is the rising cost of college tuition, which has increased by 6.3 percent at public four-year institutions and 5.9 percent at private four-year institutions since last year, according to College Board's Trends in College Pricing 2006.
Vilas Distinguished Professor Erik Wright said, ""There is a very big problem in affordability of higher education in the United States ... even in places like Wisconsin where tuition is relatively speaking low.""
According to Wright, this has two effects: some students must work to put themselves through college, putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage in their studies, and poor students must ""assume the financial risk of significant loans to be able to go to university,"" if they can afford to go at all.
Goldrick-Rab added that college is thought to be impossible for many low-income families. ""By middle school, most kids from poor families aren't even considering college,"" Goldrick-Rab said.
The second problem of socioeconomic gaps is the ability for students to gain admission to college. There are so many things that money can buy when it comes to education, such as test preparation, tutoring, counseling, admissions help or donations to a school.
Private and targeted tutoring certainly give students a hand when it comes to applying to college, but it is a resource that is largely unavailable to poorer families.
""The whole idea [of private tutoring] is to improve your scores relative to people who don't get the tutoring, and since the tutoring is expensive, it obviously is available mainly to kids with affluent parents,"" Wright said. He added that tutoring is just one more advantage that wealthier students enjoy, along with typically having better schools and higher quality counseling than poor students.
Professor Michael Thorton, faculty co-director of the Morgridge Center, described wealthier students as having a ""ticket to college"" and needing to only select the destination. ""[Test] prepping is merely one of a list unfair advantages that comes along with one's placement in the upper echelons of the social class ladder,"" Thorton said.
Goldrick-Rab added that most students are likely to raise their ACT or other standardized test score simply by taking it more than once, a commodity that poor kids may not have financial access to.
It is also important to note that most socioeconomic gaps along race lines for standardized testing and other things can be attributed to income.
According to the Wisconsin Center for Education Research website, www.wcer.edu, ""Differences in family background consistently account for about one-third of the test score gap and for almost all of the inequality in rates of college entry and graduation among black and white high school graduates.""
Socioeconomic gaps are important considering that more people than ever now attend college, but the elite, more expensive schools are attended by the wealthy privileged, usually because they had the luck to be born into a wealthy family and not for any intrinsic superiority of their own.
Goldrick-Rab said that in the last 30 years, ""more people are going to college and we're seeing bigger and bigger gaps where people go.""
A college degree is quickly becoming a prerequisite to joining the middle-class, explained Thorton.
""The gap is a significantly important issue in that a college degree has become almost a bare necessity to become economically successful in today's economy,"" Thorton said. ""Kids from working-class backgrounds at elite institutions are becoming obsolete.""
The future of an economically divided society seems somewhat bleak, and Goldrick-Rab doesn't see the socioeconomic gaps disappearing any time soon.
""I think we're going to see that continue as long as tuition continues to rise, as long as we keep placing importance on standardized tests,"" Goldrick-Rab said. ""The elite will always remain that way.""
A few things can be done to combat the inequalities of the system. Goldrick-Rab explained the importance of a holistic admissions process, which looks at the entirety of the person, and considers facts besides test scores.
There are also college access programs, which offer free tutoring or fee waivers for the ACT or applications for college. Wisconsin is also looking at the development of a program called the Wisconsin Covenant, which would go into effect after 2012 and would promise full tuition to UW schools if students are under a certain income level, fulfill scholastic requirements and display good citizenship.
According to Thorton, educating people regardless of economic standing is a benefit to all of society. ""For every one of these students who graduate from college, two to three others benefit, either family members or in the community those students come from. What better investment in all our futures?""
