Why High-Achieving, Low-Income Students Don't Feel They Belong at Elite Public Universities

The cost of a college degree is prohibitively expensive. Recently, conversations surrounding the affordability of higher education have centered on whether the Biden Administration will move ahead with plans to cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt. While loan forgiveness would offer significant relief for millions of borrowers, additional consideration is needed to address barriers to higher education on the front-end—particularly, the sticker shock of tuition costs that acts as a deterrent to many four-year degrees.

I grew up in the East Coast epicenter of academia: Cambridge, Massachusetts. Even without a personal connection to the area’s colleges and universities, my youth was steeped in the world of higher education—each block of Greater Boston seemingly branded with university insignia. I graduated from the public high school in Cambridge, Cambridge Rindge and Latin, which sits kitty-corner to the gates of Harvard Yard.

Rindge was crucial in shaping my understanding of higher education as a pivotal component of intergenerational economic outcomes. While Cambridge is an extremely wealthy area, my school served a socioeconomically and racially diverse student body, with 40 percent of my classmates qualifying for free and reduced lunch. Upon graduation, some of my peers would continue Ivy League legacies, supported by families who could afford to pay full freight, while others would be the first in their families to enroll in college.

My family fell somewhere in between—more privileged than many, but also in need of significant financial help to attend the college of my choice. We spent a good amount of time navigating the FAFSA and CSS profile to receive financial support for my twin brother and myself.

I felt incredibly lucky when my first choice school—Bates College—offered to cover about half my tuition, making my decision to enroll there a no-brainer.

All throughout my time in college, I reflected on the combination of privilege and luck that had shaped my college search process. When I graduated, I took a job as the only full-time college advisor at a small, public-pilot high school in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood, so that I could help others make their own postsecondary decisions. The majority of the students at the school came from low-income, first- or second-generation immigrant backgrounds and would be the first in their families to attend college.

Typically, due to proximity and affordability, our advising conversations gravitated toward colleges in the Massachusetts state college and university systems. There was one notable exception: few of the students I was advising seemed interested in applying to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship campus. Many of even the highest achievers were more willing to apply to nearby community colleges than to fill out the UMass Amherst application.

Initially, I was surprised by my students’ reluctance to consider the state’s flagship campus. State university systems were, after all, designed to provide in-state residents with affordable, high-quality options for postsecondary education. Considering the return on investment, an ever-growing body of research confirms that bachelor’s degree holders out-earn those with associate’s degrees—which should have made the Amherst campus a far-more attractive choice for top students in my cohort than Bunker Hill or Bay State Community College. A simple cost-benefit analysis would suggest that UMass Amherst, even with its steeper price tag, would have a much higher payoff for these students.

But I quickly learned that my conception of the mission of public universities was becoming outdated. Over the past couple of decades, UMass Amherst, like many public flagship and research universities around the country, has been striving to become more and more exclusive. In fact, the flagship’s chancellor, Kumble Subbaswamy, has been on a mission over the last ten years to propel the university into the top 20 public colleges and universities, as determined by the US News and World Report Rankings. To meet this goal, the campus has raised its academic standards, lowered its acceptance rate, and allocated an increasingly large share of its financial aid dollars to pursue affluent, high-achieving, out-of-state students.

A 2019 Boston Globe Magazine profile of Subbaswamy, inelegantly entitled “‘ZooMass' No More,” questioned whether the chancellor’s efforts to transform the flagship campus into an elite university— “Cambridge West”—left any room for the striving working-class students it had historically served. Instead, the article noted, the university was “now attracting many more students who have the credentials to get into selective private colleges but go public because their families make too much money to qualify for significant financial aid, yet not enough to cover private tuition without signing on for lots of loans.”

Whether it intended to or not, UMass Amherst was sending a message to less advantaged students that they did not belong there. The culture of elitism at Amherst was off-putting enough to deter even my most competitive students from applying. They had little faith that the university wanted them and would provide them with enough financial aid to be able to afford to attend. Rumors swirled among the senior class that the campus was stingy with grant money for in-state applicants, and instead reserved its financial aid for recruiting out-of-state students. While not entirely accurate, this perception has some basis in reality. Over the past ten years, UMass has increased its spending on non-need-based aid by almost ten times, to about $42 million annually. These funds, which account for about one-third of the university’s financial aid budget, are used primarily to recruit relatively affluent, out-of-state students, whose families can generally afford to pay the full sticker price of tuition.

In reality, the only “match” that mattered to my advisees was a school they felt confident they would be able to afford. There was no point in wasting time on applications for universities they believed wouldn’t adequately subsidize their cost of attendance. Following that reasoning, my cohort often judged schools by price first, unwilling to entertain the possibility of admission, and preemptively ruling out university options that might otherwise be academic matches. Year after year, a plurality enrolled at community colleges or at UMass Boston, which offered substantial grant awards, and allowed them to avoid room and board costs by living at home.

Driven by state divestment in higher education, and the consequent adoption of “enrollment management” practices by state universities, a similar story plays out across the country. Over the course of the last 25 years, state disinvestment has led public colleges to look elsewhere for revenue. A focus on out-of-state recruitment has become increasingly common to boost institutional income and to rise up the rankings and attain greater prestige. While low-income students are admitted, financial aid awards generally don’t meet their full financial need.

As enrollment management approaches center on high rankings and university revenue, flagships like UMass Amherst are, whether inadvertently or not, discouraging low-income in-state residents from applying. Across the country, this trend has serious implications for long-term financial well-being and intergenerational mobility. Compared to other state universities, flagships have higher graduation rates and broader alumni networks, leaving alumni better-situated to find employment upon graduation. As state universities continue to cater to out-of-state residents, they undermine the strength and economic future of their local workforce.

Instead of discouraging low-income, high-achieving students, highly selective public universities should be encouraging these students to apply and enroll. They need to show these students that they are wanted and will receive the financial support they need to attend. But how best to do that? In my next post, I will write about an experiment that one public flagship university has been conducting that aims to answer that question.

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