The Rutgers Division of Diversity, Inclusion and Community Engagement and the Eagleton Institute of Politics co-hosted a virtual book talk on Thursday to discuss "Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities."
The book's co-authors, Laura Hamilton, professor and chair of sociology at University of California (UC) Merced, and Kelly Nielsen, postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University, discussed their findings and possible solutions to address racial inequity within public universities such as Rutgers.
For most of the 1900s, Hamilton said, people of color were barred from attending public institutions of higher education, despite paying taxes to the state and federal governments that funded them. By the 1970s, people of color gained greater access to higher education, but the traditional funding structure for public universities also changed, she said.
“The federal and state investments that had built a phenomenal postsecondary infrastructure were basically systematically dismantled,” Hamilton said. “Funding decreased as the state governments made different choices about where to invest.”
For example, she said, California’s state government decreased funding for its public universities and increased funding for correctional facilities instead. These actions coincided with state governments restricting race-based affirmative action policies for university admissions, further affecting people of color in higher education.
Hamilton said that much of these policy actions were triggered by a decrease in the percentage of white students attending public flagship universities. She said the racial demographic of the college-going population has changed dramatically, with a 441.7 percent increase in Latinx college students and a 39.6 percent increase in Black students since 1976.
But without redistributive policies to accompany these shifting demographics, segregation still persists, she said.
Colleges such as UC Riverside and UC Merced are deemed “minority-serving institutions” because they accept a high proportion of racial minority students, specifically Latinx students, Hamilton said. But Nielsen said that these institutions face issues gaining funding from private sources such as tuition, donations and philanthropic investment from corporations.
“Merced and Riverside’s budgets are almost entirely dependent on the state funds that they receive,” he said. “Indeed, Merced’s foundation receives less than 1 percent of the private support that Berkeley’s foundation takes in during a given year.”
Nielsen said that a major cause of reduced funding for minority-serving institutions lies in neoliberal higher education policies. Neoliberalism is an ideology that endorses entities competing in a private market for resources and gaining them based on merit, he said.
But he said neoliberalism does not consider the idea that certain populations have historically lacked access to wealth, education and social capital, which inherently affects how they compete in a private market.
“Merit can be considered a form of laundering privilege — that is, it takes structural advantages available to some families but not others, and then obscures those privileges,” Nielsen said. “Merit leads to the sorting of students from different racial groups into different schools.”
Due to these neoliberal policies, Nielsen said UC Merced and UC Riverside serve a large proportion of underserved minority students but do not have the funding to provide them with an optimal education, unlike universities that serve more privileged and affluent students.
For example, during the 2018-2019 academic year, predominantly Latinx institutions gained approximately $4,300 less in revenue per student than other colleges within the same states, he said.
Without proper funding, minority-serving institutions cannot provide their students with essential resources such as low faculty-to-student ratios, cultural education centers, academic advising, initiatives aimed toward first-generation students and career assistance for graduating students, Nielsen said.
He said faculty and staff who seek to help students succeed find their goals limited by a lack of funding and supportive infrastructure and are forced to accept “tolerable suboptimization.”
“When universities that serve disadvantaged groups at high rates lack resources, then they may struggle to produce the kinds of outcomes that create the appearance of merit, and thus the neoliberal cycle of resource allocation begins all over again,” Nielsen said.
Hamilton said Rutgers is transitioning into becoming a school that serves underserved and underrepresented racial minorities and so should implement specific actions to succeed in this goal.
For example, she said Rutgers should put pressure on the state government to fund the University at rates that provide a more racially diverse student body the same level of education as a more white and affluent student body.
Hamilton said Rutgers should stop advertising metrics such as the average standardized test scores of its students and instead market the value it adds to students’ lives. She said this should be done in tandem with other universities through consortiums such as the University Innovation Alliance to ensure success and widespread change.
She said public universities like Rutgers should also embrace the unique perspectives that racially marginalized students bring with them, structuring courses and academic support to fit their needs — especially for students who cannot rely on family for social capital and financial support.
“Schools need to think intentionally about what the university can offer its students rather than outsourcing student support to families,” she said. “This means ensuring that sufficient advising, mental health and financial services are in place and letting students know how to access them and making sure that staff have experienced working with students of color and with low-income students.”
Hamilton said public universities should ensure that racially marginalized students are seen and heard by properly funding cultural centers, hiring and recognizing more people of color in faculty and staff and examining the relationship between on-campus police and students of color.
Lastly, she said Rutgers should think about how funding is allocated between its New Brunswick, Newark and Camden campuses, considering that the latter two serve significantly higher proportions of underrepresented minorities.
“It really takes a willingness for campus leadership to not always be focused on a competition but rather saying, ‘Okay, we can give here a little bit, and that in the long run will be better off if we work collaboratively,’” she said. “State systems will break apart with everybody on their own trying to compete for private resources if there isn't a working together, shared interest in convincing the state that this is actually worth continuing to invest in.”
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Rutgers hosts book talk on 'Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities' - RU Daily Targum
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