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Nearly half of those will be unable to pay for an education at a two-year institution, according to a 2002 report by the congressional Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance.

Increased cost affects students at every type of institution. During the past 10 years, tuition and fees rose 51 percent at public four-year institutions, 36 percent at private four-year colleges, and 26 percent at two-year colleges, according to The College Board’s Trends in College Pricing, 2004. The trend is not likely to reverse itself anytime soon.

Perhaps most disturbing, though not surprising: These rising costs hit poor families hardest. Most are unable to save the money required to qualify for federal tax breaks, and many students from low-income families don’t benefit from merit-based aid programs.

At the same time, data from The College Board also show that the purchasing power of federal Pell grants for low-income students has declined significantly despite recent increases in funding.  A combination of rising costs and greater student demand results in Pell grants covering only about 23 percent of the total charges at four-year public institutions in 2003-04, down from 35 percent in 1980-81.

For a low-income family, the average annual bill for attending a four-year public institution in 2001-02 represented nearly 60 percent of income, up from 42 percent in 1971-72. The comparable figures for a high-income family were 5 percent in 2001-02, down from 6 percent in 1971-72, according to America’s Untapped Resource: Low-Income Students in Higher Education.

“The rising cost of college is one of the most critical issues facing higher education access,” says Martha Lamkin, president and CEO of Lumina Foundation for Education. “The cost of college has outpaced inflation significantly and outpaced families’ abilities to pay.”

Left unchecked, the high cost of college could have far-reaching effects — from diminishing America’s ability to compete in the global economy to substantially widening the gap between the country’s wealthy and low-income families.

Summit planned, partnerships support initiative
To emphasize this issue and begin a national dialogue, Lumina Foundation, in collaboration with the James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy, is sponsoring a national invitational summit on November 2, 2005. (See sidebar story for more details.) The Foundation has formed partnerships with more than 50 different associations, organizations, foundations and other groups that support the initiative. “The partners agree with the principles of the project and will work to support the initiative by making this topic a priority,” according to Robert Dickeson, senior vice president of Lumina Foundation.

“The Foundation intends to fund additional research on the topic and provide grants to implement solutions,” Dickeson says. “Some solutions are as simple as having the three state entities that set tuition, state appropriations and financial aid align themselves and work together.”

Future plans also call for fostering continued collaboration through meetings and workshops, increasing awareness of the issue with communication initiatives, and continuing the effort to build an alliance of effective partners that can take action to reduce the cost of higher education.

“We need to bring people together — from all different constituencies — to collaborate if we expect to make any changes,” Dickeson says.

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Summit, Web site focus on issue

Lumina Foundation has undertaken an initiative to seek solutions to help make higher education affordable, particularly for low-income, minority and first-generation college students.

The Foundation launched a special Web site designed to highlight the issue.

National Summit
In November, the Foundation will bring together about 400 individuals from higher education, federal and state governments, businesses and corporations, and secondary schools for a national, one-day summit in Washington, D.C., designed to generate solutions.

Thomas Friedman to keynote
Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist and noted author Thomas Friedman will address the group, discussing how higher education is affected by the globalization of the world’s economy.

In conjunction with the meeting, Lumina will release a collection of essays offering proposed solutions to the problem.

The essays, written in response to the Foundation’s Call for Solutions issued in July 2004, were chosen for publication by a national panel of experts.  The collection is titled Course Correction: Experts offer solutions to the college costs crisis; it will be available later this year.