Giving Compass' Take:

• Jon Marcus explores the decline of middle-class enrollment in higher education and how universities are trying to attract this important demographic.

• Is tuition the only barrier to entry for middle-class students? How can funders help shift the focus of higher education intervention to this demographic?

• Read about why the middle class requires more than free college.

The proportion of middle-class students at colleges and universities has been quietly declining, sharply enough that some institutions — worried about the effect on campus diversity and their own bottom lines — have started publicly announcing special scholarships to cover all or most of their tuition.

It may seem counterintuitive to hear that efforts to increase diversity include enrolling more students from the middle class, as opposed to those from families with the lowest incomes. In fact, the proportion of students on college campuses from the lowest-income families is going up, the Pew Research Center reports, while the share of students from the middle has fallen by about 6-8 percent in the last two decades.

Middle-class high school students give a number of reasons for forgoing higher education, according to an analysis of federal data by the Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce, but a quarter of middle-class high school students who don’t plan on college said it was because of the expense. The inflation-adjusted published price of college tuition, fees, room and board between 1999 and this 2019 increased 54 percent at private nonprofit and 78 percent at public universities and colleges, according to the College Board. The median income of middle-class families, when adjusted for inflation, Pew says, hardly budged during that period of time.

Alarmed by this trend, some universities and colleges have started channeling more financial aid to middle-class students.

Middle-class students arrive better prepared than low-income students, experts point out, having typically gone to better-resourced public or private high schools. They bring higher grade-point averages and standardized test scores on which college rankings are partly based. And unlike students from the poorest families, middle-income ones can afford to pay at least part of the tuition, plus room and board, from which institutions earn important revenue.

Read the full article about how middle-class students are disappearing from American campuses by Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report.