HIGHER EDUCATION: NOT SUCH AN ECONOMIC EQUALIZER AFTER ALL? “Whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t.” So encouraging poor and working-class kids to go to college may leave them without a degree, but with debt, and thus worse off than if they hadn’t gone at all.
This is something I’ve talked about before. But read the whole thing, as there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on at UT-Austin, though I question whether it will scale.