UMS, others vow to cut achievement gap

In a coordinated stab at one of higher education’s most pressing problems, some of the country’s largest university systems, including Maine’s, pledged Wednesday to cut in half the achievement gaps for minority and low-income students on their campuses over the next eight years.

The announcement comes at a time of deep concern that, from everyday undergraduates to the ranks of elite faculty, America’s colleges and universities don’t look much like the country as a whole.

That point was underscored by a study released Wednesday tracking the representation of women and minority faculty in elite science departments, which found minorities are making little progress moving up the ranks. Women are faring noticeably better than five years ago, but still trail well behind men.

The University of Maine System is among 19 public university systems committed to halving by 2015 two key gaps separating low-income and minority students from others – the rates of attending college and of graduating.

Nationally, whites aged 25 to 29 are twice as likely as blacks and three times as likely as Hispanics to have a college degree. And by age 24, high-income students are eight times more likely to have a bachelor’s degree than low-income ones.

“Our nation’s fastest-growing populations are our nation’s lowest achievers,” said Tom Meredith, Mississippi’s commissioner of higher education. “So we agreed something had to be done.”

The plans are potentially important for several reasons.

They include the giant state university systems of California, Florida, New York as well as the City University of New York. Overall, the group educates about 2 million undergraduates and about one-third of the nation’s low-income and minority four-year college students.

“If they’re able to turn their system patterns around, it will have a massive impact,” said Kati Haycock, president of The Education Trust, a Washington-based group that is partnering in the program.

The systems also have committed to holding themselves accountable by publicly reporting detailed data on their progress, including figures that generally have not been released, such as graduation rates for low-income students.

The question is whether the universities will go beyond the piecemeal approaches like summer recruiting and mentoring programs that have typified higher education’s efforts to increase diversity so far. They insisted they would.

Acknowledging the K-12 system isn’t entirely to blame, the systems said they would work together to wrestle with fundamental obstacles on their own campuses. Those include rising tuition and living costs, financial aid that is used to lure high-achieving students but doesn’t get to the neediest, and reforming the giant, introductory courses where many students are lost.

College leaders added the effort has nothing to do with affirmative action, but rather with hard work to get college-ready students into and through college.

Plans for reaching the goal will vary from state to state. Louisiana, for instance, will work to improve high-demand courses and expand a tuition discount program that encourages students to stay enrolled as they get closer to a degree.

The dearth of women and minorities in top-level science departments is an issue affecting far fewer people, but it, too, has attracted widespread attention. Former Harvard President Lawrence Summers fueled the debate with his infamous 2005 comments that, for the very highest-level jobs, innate ability may partly explain why there are so few women.

Many universities, including Harvard, have taken steps to try to improve conditions and mentoring for women scientists.

But some underrepresented minorities haven’t done as well. In some fields, the proportion of faculty who are black, Hispanic or American Indian has actually declined – from 3.6 percent to 2.3 percent in the top-50 math programs, and from 4.3 percent to 3.6 percent in electrical engineering.