Theda Skocpol has a wonderful essay in the Democracy: A Journal of Ideas (you all should sign up for it). She writes that less lower income kids are going to college than ever before.
expansion slowed, but social opportunity has constricted, despite the
heightened value of a college degree. In 1979, the "premium" for an
American worker who had completed a college degree was about 1.4 times
the income of a worker who had not completed a degree–and that premium
grew to 1.75 by the end of the century, where it remains today.
Families obviously have a greater incentive to send offspring to
college, and the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled has indeed
grown by more than a third since the late 1970s. Still, the overall
enrollment increase has lagged the rising wage differential, and the
response has been especially sluggish lower down the income ladder.
Class gaps in enrollment have expanded in the past several decades, and
so have racial gaps between whites and blacks (even in an era when U.S.
blacks have become increasingly likely to graduate from high school).
More
than a third of a century ago, in 1970, 6.2 percent of the U.S.
population in the bottom income quartile had completed a baccalaureate
degree by age 24–and that percentage actually declined slightly, to 6
percent, by the year 2000. Lower-middle-income young people from the
second (to the bottom) income quartile improved their college
completion rates only slightly from 1970 to 2000, from 10.9 percent to
12.7 percent. But note the contrasting trajectories for young people in
the upper half of the income distribution. For those in the third
quartile–solidly middle-class families–completion percentages rose
markedly, from 14.9 percent in 1970 to 26.8 percent in 2000. And for
the most privileged young people, those from upper-middle-class and
upper-class families in the top quarter of the income distribution,
college completion rates rose from 40.2 percent in 1970 to 51.3 percent
in 2000. Compared to the mid-twentieth century, higher education is now
increasingly exacerbating socioeconomic inequality in the United
States. Its success at fostering upward mobility has diminished
sharply.
One of the chief culprits for this stagnation of class mobility is the student loan program. Pell grants have remained constant as tuition has sky-rocketed, due to declining public investment. She proposes more grants and a stream-lined system for getting these loans.
Apt. 11d 
Some of it is underprepared students underserved by high school educations. Some of it is community colleges being underfunded.
And I know this is a relatively small thing but important to me: textbook prices. We were talking about our lit text the other day, and it’s about $80 for a book I know these kids will never keep. And the crazy thing is that I can find most of the poems/stories/etc. online (and do–I have a Ning where I link them). I’ve told the students that if they are diligent with getting copies of the readings, they don’t have to buy the book, and I told them I would help them find copies. But I am just one professor. I wish I could teach my courses with all online texts, but as I said on my blog, I have a flexible job in many ways but I have to sacrifice other areas of flexibility, and one of those is that we have a required textbook in our courses.
I think this is one of the areas where higher ed is going to have to adjust/change. Just because *we* love to have physical books in our hands, dogeared pages and all, doesn’t mean our students do or should have to.
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“And I know this is a relatively small thing but important to me: textbook prices.”
I believe there may be a trend toward not buying the books on the courselist.
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Is this a growing class gap in college, or a growing class gap in completing college by age 24?
Because more and more people are going to college part-time or later.
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My guess would be that assortive mating is making things even more unequal than skocpol’s figures indicate, particularly if you think not in terms of inequality between individuals but between families.
At least here in the UK (and I suspect it’s the same in the US) much and maybe even most of the growth in university enrolment over the last several decades has been among middle-class females. This is fabulous (and just) for that group, but because of assortive mating and the growth of the two earner household, I think it is helping to drive socioeconomic polarisation at the level of the household. On the one hand you have far more families in which both the male and female are university graduates; on the other you have lots of families in which neither is. In a post-industrial society, this latter group gets left further and further behind.
Before the huge rise in middle-class female university participation, “university graduate families” were very likely to only have one (male) university graduate in them, making them more similar to “non-university graduate families”.
This is a vexing issue. It is right and just that so many more females have been able to get university degrees, but those degrees have gone overwhelmingly to the middle classes. I’m not sure that anyone foresaw that expanded higher education would be so systematically biased towards those in the upper two quintiles, and that it would thus fuel socioeconomic inequality. I really think the system, both in the UK and the US (and probably in a lot of other countries too) needs fundamental redesign if it’s not going to continue exacerbating the problem.
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I’m wary of these quintile analyses, because we do not have a static country. In particular, immigrants enter our country, many in the bottom quintile. This influx means that examining college trends over different time points might reflect trends in immigration, rather than trends in college-going, specifically. And the 1970 v 2000 comparison lends itself to this confound, because American immigration laws changed right around 1970, changing the population influx into the US.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do something about it (i.e. if immigrants in the bottom quintile don’t have access to college, for example), but the solutions might be different from what you expect.
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