On the other hand, a report by the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics2 projects that, due to the consistent increase of minorities enrolling in post-secondary education, by 2026 most college students will be people of color, with an increase of 26 percent of Hispanic students between 2015 and 2026. There is a problematic paradox here: while minorities are increasingly entering higher education institutions, there is a constant tendency to the increment of tuition fees and an overall shrinking of state and local support.

The ongoing affordability crisis affects mainly students from lower income families. Sadly, the current tendency is not to tackle that crisis to avoid pricing out students. Instead, there is a deepening of the understanding of universities as private enterprises that sell luxury services. University funding policies are deeply connected with social ones. A tendency in policies that favors tuitions over public funds affect those with less economical possibilities. That shift could deeply affect the mentioned tendency of a more diverse body of students in higher education.

Another growing tendency in certain sectors of society is one of distrusting academia as a center for reliable knowledge. We are living in times when our previous ways of defining truths are constantly relativized by fact-blind opinions. Science is no longer considered “reliable” by a large section of the population that uses as “alternative” explanations ideas coming from “thinkers” that range from conspiracy theorists to pseudo-scientists. University campuses have shifted from being places for progressive practices to being understood as advocate censors of the “politically correct” and even being accused of violating freedom of speech. To make it worse, those ideologies have grown in their social and political impact in the recent times, also due to the practices of the current administration. In that state of affairs, the odds seem pretty dark for politicians entering a discussion for bigger state participation in the funding of higher education.        

The shrinking of state funding affects not only the students but has an impact also on the general functioning of the institutions.  Some institutions are compelled to adopt more “efficient” models, and so the solution becomes defunding “unnecessary” expenses that originally were destined for the improvement of working conditions. Those cuts, even when they provide temporary solutions, are damaging for the quality of the educational process.

High fees are not only an obstacle for accessing education but also affects the possibilities for successfully completing educational cycles. With the current understanding of funding, a student doesn’t generally include other living and academic expenses. Those expenses are frequently very high and are an essential reason for either low performances or cause for drop offs. There is an urgent need for developing informed policies that tackle the current problems of higher education funding. At the beginning of such policies, there should be an understanding for the need of a closer collaboration between the federal and the state in creating matching grant programs for the creation of real affordability. Such programs should also consider not only the possibility for students to access education but also the quality of such access that includes parameters such as the rate of full-time enrollment, living conditions and specific income conditions.

Maybe universities can still retain the possibility of becoming ethnically diverse institutions for progressive social and scientific thought. But their economical practices will define that possibility as much as the academic programs they develop. If the focus keeps shifting into fast profitability and least government participation, in consequence universities will probably lean towards conservative and traditionalistic forms of instruction and management. A diverse representation of ethnicities in academia can be essential for an inclusive future. Because of that, investing in facilitating the access of students of color to higher education is investing in the potentiality of that future.

1 http://www.sheeo.org/projects/shef-fy17

2 https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018019.pdf •