Report suggests elite schools direct dollars toward admitting more low-income students

A report, by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, proposes that the nation’s most selective colleges and universities give special preference in the admissions process to qualified students from low-income families, who “vastly less likely to attend those schools than wealthier Americans with similar academic ability.

An article published on Monday in The Hechinger Report, an online newspaper funded in part by the Cooke Foundation, said the foundation suggests that he deck at most selective colleges is stacked against poor kids.

The foundation’s report supports giving preference as “a way to ensure that low-income students have access to top colleges and universities, where they are now underrepresented,” Hechinger reported.

According to the report, cost keeps low-income students from applying to top colleges. And the report says lLegacy applicants, for example, or children of alumni, have much higher odds of acceptance than other students.

And last week Bloomberg reported that a congressional bill proposes to require schools with endowments of more than $1 billion to use a quarter of their annual endowment income toward student financial aid,

Schools that don’t comply could down the road lose their nonprofit status.

This story was originally published January 12, 2016 at 12:52 PM with the headline "Report suggests elite schools direct dollars toward admitting more low-income students."