The federal government spent five decades defunding the pipeline that carries low-income students into college, and then it let Keana Johnson fall through the gap.
Howard University disenrolled 502 first-time-in-college students this month who did not submit tuition payments by a July 10 deadline, despite notifications the school says began in March. Saniah Collins told the AP she worked like crazy to get in, that Howard was everything. Keana Johnson, seventeen, lives in a New York City shelter. She saw Howard as the door out — the door her parents’ generation was told education would open. She never received the deadline notice. SUNY and CUNY campuses in New York are now offering expedited late admissions to displaced students. The University of the District of Columbia extended its application deadline to August 7. The system is scrambling to catch students it dropped. This is the second consecutive year Howard has left hundreds of students in this position. Last year’s “Whose Howard Is It” movement demanded better financial aid support. The demand was not met.
The pipeline that was supposed to carry students like Keana was federal. The Pell Grant, created in 1972, covered roughly 80 percent of the cost of attending a four-year public university at its inception. Today it covers about 27 percent, according to analyses from the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities and Inside Higher Ed. The collapse did not happen by accident. Congress cut, then froze, then cut again — and the gap between what the government committed and what it actually funds now rivals the entire Title I appropriation. The federal government has, for fifty years, paid roughly one-third of what it promised for higher education access, and the difference comes out of the students. Sara Goldrick-Rab’s research at the Hope Center at Temple documents what that gap looks like at ground level: roughly half of college students experiencing food insecurity and more than a third housing insecure in any given month. The same retreat extends to K-12, where Title I funding has stagnated for decades, and to the student-loan portfolio that holds more than $1.6 trillion across forty million borrowers — the exit wound of the pipeline, a debt load that prevents graduates from building wealth. The expanded Child Tax Credit, in effect for six months in 2021, cut child poverty almost in half — a near-controlled experiment in what happens when the federal government funds the pipeline. When it lapsed, poverty returned. The Center for American Progress calculated that the Build Back Better childcare cap would have saved typical families in thirty-two states more than $5,000 a year. It died before it reached the floor. These were not failures of understanding. Each was a decision, by named actors at named moments, to decide that the families the pipeline was designed to reach were not worth the public investment.
I have spent enough time with the college savings calculator to know it spits out a number that honest families cannot meet. Five hundred dollars a month per child, starting at birth, just to stay ahead of an in-state public university two decades from now. That line will not balance against the mortgage, the daycare, the student loan, the pediatric co-pays, and the monthly trip to the discount grocery. A two-income household that has done everything the system asked still lands on the wrong side of the equation. A kid in a shelter never stood a chance.
Howard is not innocent in this sequence. Last year a platform migration to BisonHub left about a thousand student accounts in limbo between January and June; Howard told the Guardian that “each long overdue balance should have been well understood and resolved by the student.” This year the explanation is simpler: a university that depends on tuition revenue looked at its admitted class, saw which kids could not pay, and cut them loose. The institutional sin compounds the federal one. The federal government broke the promise, Howard could not absorb the broken promise, and Keana lost the spot she earned.
Howard is a private HBCU without a state funding backstop. Its endowment cannot absorb 502 unpaid balances indefinitely — and it is a fraction of the size of the mostly white institutions whose “need-blind” admissions policies are underwritten by billion-dollar cushions. The students Howard got rid of are the students those other schools can afford to chase. The ones Howard needs to stay afloat are the ones it cannot carry. For institutions that exist to serve exactly the students the federal pipeline was built for, the underfunding is not a budget problem. It is a slow institutional death — the same structural starvation that closed the parish schools in Lansdale when the government stopped funding the mission. My parents’ generation grew up in a country where Republicans co-sponsored the creation of the Department of Education and treated public investment in schooling as a public obligation. I am raising my children in a country where the people redesigning the system are the same people who told us in 2007 the housing market could not crash. That suspicion is data.
The federal government is, in effect, performing a generational betrayal with constitutional dimensions. It defunded the pipeline, then let the institutions that served the pipeline bleed, then let the students bleed when the institutions could not hold. The patch is not a second-choice public seat that opens six days after a student’s future collapsed. The patch is a higher-education financing system that treats every admitted student as though the public has a stake in her graduating — because it does. That means re-funding the Pell Grant so its purchasing power returns to what the parents of today’s college students remember. It means making public universities free enough that a school like Howard is not forced to choose between its own balance sheet and the kids who need it most. It means not running the university that generations of Black families have trusted as an engine of ascent like a business that books revenue before the quarter closes. You cannot run a campus on an enrollment deposit scraped together by a mother in a shelter, and you cannot call it meritocracy when the only thing a kid got wrong was not being born into a ZIP code that could absorb a surprise bill.
Keana Johnson is, at this writing, still in a shelter. She is still checking her phone. She is still holding an acceptance letter to a place the system told her she earned and would not let her keep. The pipeline was supposed to carry her. It did not. Nobody is coming.