As we've faced the torrent of news about federal budget cuts that will harm low-income and working-class students, we're also seeing state financial aid programs falling short.
Both North Carolina and Minnesota have announced serious budget shortfalls in their "promise" programs designed to encourage high school students to aspire to and plan for college, even if their families can't readily pay for it.
In part, the shortfalls are measures of the programs' successes: Budget shortfalls are attributable in part to more young people with financial need applying to and enrolling in college.
But the shortfalls in these state programs also make clear the piecemeal and precarious work of enabling poor and working-class students to aspire to college: The chaos in federal financial aid makes it impossible for states to predict student needs. The costs of college continue to rise because of everything from the costs of keeping the lights on to covering employees' health insurance. States continue to shift the costs of going to college directly to students as state subsidies fall and tuition is raised. Students now enrolling in college have deeper financial needs.
None of this signals to poor and working-class students that they can and should aspire to college without the endless worry of how to pay for food and books.
All of this infers instead that access to college for poor and working-class students is at best an afterthought for policy makers, that the "real" college students are those whose families can pay for everything (and coach their kids on making it through), and that two full generations after landmark federal legislation decreeing that college education cannot be only for the wealthy, we are too often moving backwards instead of forward.
