The Price of Admission: Rethinking How Americans Pay for College

by Thomas J. Kane

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Over the past fifteen years, a college education has become increasingly valuable in the labor market. As a result, the stakes have been raised in the debate over college admissions and student financial aid. With the gap in college enrollment widening by family income, the time has come to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the American system for financing higher education and to rethink its structure from the ground up. This book begins with an overview of the many indirect ways in which Americans pay for college--as taxpayers, students, and parents--and describes the sometimes perverse ways in which state and federal financial aid policies interact. Thomas J. Kane evaluates alternative explanations for the rise in public and private college costs--weighing the role of federal financial aid policy, higher input costs, and competitive pressures on individual colleges. He analyzes how far we have come in ensuring access to all. Evidence suggests that large differences in college enrollment remain between high and low income students, even those with similar test scores and attending the same high schools. Kane promotes a package of reforms intended to squeeze more social bang from the many public bucks devoted to higher education. For example, he advocates ""front-loading"" the Pell grant program, limiting eligibility to those in their first two years of college, and providing a larger share of federal subsidies by assessing student resources after college rather than evaluating a single year of parents income and assets before college. Copublished with the Russell Sage Foundation
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Genres: Education

175 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 1999

Reviews

[Yx · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book read like a compiled list of news articles on college admissions. It is informative. The authors used a vast number of incidents to show that the rich and famous have an edge in elite colleges admissions. This is news and not news. The author offered his own opinions on how to reform the admission process, but in my opinion, none is practical. Many of the practices are rooted deeply in the nature of a capitalism society, and nothing has worked better than capitalism in human history.

[A. · Rating 2 out of 5]

An entire book on what is common knowledge about how people who are extremely wealthy, related to alumni or fabulously famous get into Universities. Over and over the author discusses the children of politicians. Very depressing book. Not sure who the target audience is for this book. Unless you enjoy reading about how your child will not be able to compete with Justin Bieber to get into a big name school, skip this book. This information could have been covered in a news article and would have been a great, short read.
However, if this is where your interests are, there are many, many facts and figures to support the repetitive argument. So, it would be a great reference book for a paper on college admissions.