Georgia earns high spot on sinking scale

The state of Georgia’s flagship institution of higher education is ranked among the nation’s best in a new national survey of 170 American colleges and universities.

This annual New York Times ranking isn’t about academics or athletics, but affordability. Specifically, the Times ranked both public and private schools in terms of what those colleges and universities are doing to make higher education more affordable for low-income students.

First the good news: The University of Georgia ranks 27th overall and 10th among all U.S. public universities in terms of making a college education accessible to many for whom it would otherwise be economically impossible. In a news release published in the Athens Banner-Herald after publication of the report, UGA President Jere Morehead said the university has made “tremendous strides in expanding need-based aid for our students.”

As reported in the Banner-Herald, the UGA Foundation matches any gift of $50,000, $75,000 or $100,000 that is specifically designated for need-based scholarships (more than 90 such donations have already been recorded, according to UGA), and the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation has contributed a record $30 million for need-based financial aid.

That kind of attention to means-based scholarship needs is an encouraging trend, and one from which the state of Georgia can benefit immensely if it’s being replicated at other University System of Georgia institutions, including Columbus State University.

But Georgia and the other universities and colleges cited on this list are high spots on what continues to be sinking ground, according to the Times. The bottom line is that college education in the United States continues to be less and less accessible for more and more otherwise qualified students.

The Times ranking is based on a school’s average cost for low- and middle-income students; the percentage of freshmen receiving Pell Grants; and the graduation rates of those students. (Only colleges and universities with overall graduation rates of 75 percent or higher are ranked.)

An unsettling — though, given soaring rates of tuition inflation, hardly surprising — trend the Times noted in its 2017 list is that the percentage of freshmen who have Pell Grants continues to fall — not because there is less need, or fewer college-qualified applicants, but because the number of students who still can’t afford college even with the help of a Pell grant is growing.

(That’s already a familiar dynamic in Georgia with regard to the achievement-based HOPE scholarships: For a growing number of the state’s best and brightest, even the relatively small percentage of college cost that HOPE doesn’t cover is beyond families’ means.)

The reductions in HOPE funding, in fact, are emblematic of a trend that goes well beyond Georgia. Deep cuts in states’ higher education budgets, and consequent hikes in tuition at public institutions, are worsening what the Banner-Herald calls the “affordability gap” and what Times writer David Leonhardt, in a companion article to the poll, calls the “declining economic diversity” of American higher education.

In whatever terms we choose to describe it, an American college and university establishment increasingly closed to all but the economic elite cannot be said to encompass “public” institutions by any coherent definition of that word.

Kudos to UGA for addressing the issue, and the Board of Regents should pursue it system-wide. Perhaps they are doing so already. It’s no discredit to Georgia’s success to note that the university earned a good grade on what continues to be a downward curve.

This story was originally published June 3, 2017 at 3:58 PM with the headline "Georgia earns high spot on sinking scale."