It’s a bit on the “education wonk” side of writing, but if you can get past that, I’d recommend reading “We Need a new Kind of Financial Aid” by Charles B. Reed and F. King Alexander in Inside Higher Ed. Here’s a quote:
If we are going to change the way colleges and universities approach economically disadvantaged students, we need to provide actual federal funding for these “cost of education allowances.” Currently, there are no fiscal incentives for colleges and universities to attract and graduate lower-income students. In fact, current federal direct student aid programs in their totality encourage colleges and universities to pursue more free market agendas by providing incentives for tuition-based financial strategies. This essentially means that higher cost institutions, both public and private, have disproportionately benefited from federal student aid funding due to the cost sensitivity embedded in the system. Additionally, by supporting tuition and fee-based strategies, the federal government has allowed state legislatures to more readily opt out of their funding responsibilities, resulting in continuous reductions in state tax support of public higher education. An indirect result of this existing system is that there are no incentives for lower cost institutions that serve the masses or states that strive to keep higher education affordable. One important, but unanticipated, outcome has been that as states increasingly withdraw their public support of public institutions, many universities have found other alternatives to educating more costly lower-income students, such as increasing out-of-state enrollments in exchange for less wealthy in-state students.
Except for that last part about attracting more out-of-state students, I think this kind of sums up the situation at institutions like EMU fairly accurately.
