This is a good short essay on how congress has all but abandoned the commitment of the 1965 Higher Education Act that education is a public good, that college cannot just be for the children of wealth.
Rather than doing the overdue but necessary revision and renewal of the HEA, federal higher education funding is on the back burner of partisan brinksmanship and a deeply broken appropriations system.
The federal appropriations process, once a vehicle for steady investment in the nation’s priorities, has been weaponized—and students are collateral damage. ... Congress consistently misses its own deadlines, instead relying on continuing resolutions, short-term fixes and partisan negotiations that leave students, families and the colleges that serve them in a constant state of uncertainty.
To be clear, the students referenced here are those with need-based financial aid and support, not the children of congress people and cabinet members or many state legislators.
Access to higher education for poor and working-class students has always been left to the political will of the privileged.
Yet in the most common forms of support programming for the poor and working-class students who do make it to college, questions of justice and equity and political advocacy for first-generation students are on campus back burners.
As that very access – written into federal law in 1965 – is threatened by the indifference and ill-will of many of the privileged, it seems an excellent time to imagine how all students might leave college understanding structural class inequalities, power, and privilege. It also seems an excellent time to imagine poor and working-class students learning to organize and advocate on behalf of themselves, their families and communities. Lauding them for being trailblazers out of those communities without also clarifying why their trails have been strewn with obstacles seems to be falling short of this moment.
