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Ed, The WA legislature’s decision to allow the UW free range in setting its tuition, is a large step toward privatization. As we go that route, we need to ask ourselves how is a pubic university, funded by tuition, different from a private university?
This difference between private and public is especially important for the UW and other “public ivies,” that is public schools that offer a standard of education comparable to that of America’s great private schools. The most startling difference is in the small number of low income students able to attend the great private universities vs. the high numbers attending the UW and its sister at Berkeley, Madison, Los Angeles, Chapel Hill, etc.
During the past decade, the country’s wealthiest and most elite colleges have faced heightened pressure to serve more low-income students. Many of the colleges responded by pouring millions of dollars into generous financial-aid policies and increasing their recruitment efforts.
But those measures seem to have barely moved the needle. The share of undergraduates receiving federal Pell Grants, which go to financially needy students, at many of the nation’s wealthiest institutions has remained relatively flat in the past five years, according to a Chronicle analysis of data from the Education Department.
Just under 15 percent of the undergraduates at the country’s 50 wealthiest colleges received Pell Grants in 2008-9, the most recent year for which national data are available. That percentage hasn’t changed much from 2004-5, around the time that elite institutions focused their attention on the issue. And Pell Grant students are still significantly less represented at the wealthiest colleges than they are at public and nonprofit four-year colleges nationwide, where grant recipients accounted for roughly 26 percent of students in 2008-9. read more.