Amherst College President Tony Marx has set in motion an initiative to attract lower-income students whose annual family income is less than $40,000.
Amherst has practiced race-conscious admissions practices for approximately 40 years, but the college is now looking to be more mindful of class during the recruitment and admissions process. Administrators at Amherst hope this initiative will prompt other elite colleges and universities to follow suit.
The college plans to expand its total enrollment by admitting approximately 30 more students each year. Of those 30 additional students, administrators project 10 to 12 will be from the low-income quartile. Currently, 16 percent of Amherst students are recipients of Federal Pell Grants.
Part of Amherst's initiative is designed to lessen the disparity in higher education between the lower and upper class. According to the Century Foundation, a New York City-based public policy think tank, just 3 percent of students from the 146 most selective colleges in the nation comes from the lowest socioeconomic quartile, while 74 percent is from the top quartile.
"I really do believe, as does our president, that we have an absolutely ironclad moral responsibility to be teaching a broader range of socioeconomic backgrounds than we currently are," said Thomas Parker, dean of admissions and financial aid at Amherst.
Although there have been concerns that admitting more lower-income students would jeopardize academic standards, Parker said the college's new initiative will be implemented without lowering these standards.
Parker said the initiative aims to actively recruit first-generation college and low-income students in order to foster a more diverse student body. "Low-income kids have been a forgotten constituency in selective colleges," he said.
Geoffrey Woglom, an economics professor at Amherst, said he believes the new initiative will not lead the college to admit under-qualified applicants.
"A lot of the kids who are ready to move very quickly come from prep schools and really high-quality public high schools. Some of the kids who are not quite ready to do that come from much less advantageous schools," he said.
Woglom said the needs of these students cannot always be met in the same classroom, and that the economics department at Amherst has created advanced sections for those students ready for more intensive work and intermediate sections for students who want more detail-oriented instruction.
Parker said this practice does not create a divide between students. "It's not as if they are unable to do the work academically; they are doing superb academically and they're not alienated," he said.
In an e-mail to The Herald, Michael Simmons, who is from a lower-income family and is president of the student government at Amherst, wrote, "I cannot detect any palpable divides along income lines. Our problem, like that at so many other colleges and universities, is that kids clique. And unfortunately, sometimes that cliquing can happen based on background."
Simmons also wrote that this initiative would not sacrifice the college's academic prestige.
"Not only will more young people get a top flight education, but Amherst College de-elitifies itself while continuing to offer elite education," Simmons wrote. "By incorporating more economic diversity within the student body, we give Amherst a more cosmopolitan dimension, which benefits the entire campus. I cannot think of a single reason not to support (Marx's) plan."
The biggest challenge in increasing the number of low-income students lies in recruitment, Parker said, because there aren't the same tools in place to recruit low-income students as there are to recruit students from diverse racial and cultural backgrounds. "We can spend a week in New York visiting high schools and talk to a significant amount of black, Latino and Asian-American students, but low-income students are much more scattered," he said.
One tool Parker would like to use is currently prohibited. About 20 years ago, colleges could target and contact low-income students by mail, but when schools started to use family income to exclude students rather than to include them, the College Board barred schools from having knowledge of a student's family income, Parker said.
Parker said that if the College Board would allow schools to write directly to low-income students and talk about their loans, scholarships and grants, then a lot of students who would never be thinking about schools like Amherst and Brown would start seeing these institutions as possibilities.
Parker said the success of the initiative is contingent upon the quality of a student's grade and secondary school education.
"K-12 is in desperate need, particularly for lower-income kids," he said. "I think that there are plenty of low-income kids that are very talented and who would benefit tremendously from a Brown or an Amherst, we just have to identify them."
"Part of the reason why a place like Brown or Amherst needs to be racially and socioeconomically diverse is that these are folks that go into leadership positions in their communities and are much more likely to say, 'Look, education is so crucial that all schools need to be good, not only the schools in affluent suburbs or public schools,'" Parker added.
Brenda Allen, Brown's associate provost and director of institutional diversity, said despite a divide between economic classes, "education is the best equalizer of the human experience." She added that high-quality education should be available to all classes.
"The circumstances that you're born in do not determine your ability to contribute to an intellectual environment," Allen said, adding that when low-income and high-income students interact, there are "profoundly positive" effects because they help to eliminate class stereotypes that pervade society.
Allen said admissions officers try to present Brown to all economic classes by annually visiting many large inner city and rural high schools.
Allen said policies like need-blind admissions help to evaluate students regardless of class and resources. She cited the Sidney E. Frank Endowed Scholarship Fund, which provides certain undergraduates with full scholarships, as an example of a program that provides significant assistance for the neediest undergraduate students.
