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"Black Girl in Paris" by Shay Youngblood
A breathless novel traces the footsteps of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin, but sidles around the topic of race.
By Gaiutra Bahadur
[02/16/00]

It's how they take you anywhere
A Rudyard Kipling story is all I need to transport an after-school classroom of rowdy 9-year-olds.
By Beth Kephart
[02/16/00]

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"Nobrow" by John Seabrook and "No Logo" by Naomi Klein
A self-revealing reflection on the sick fixations of the media elite stalls out. Is a guerrilla war enough to wake them up?
By Austin Bunn
[02/15/00]

Dear Mr. Blue
Can men and women truly be friends?
My therapist thinks my male pal dumped me because he has the hots for me. Do I need to worry about my other guy pals now?
By Garrison Keillor
[02/15/00]

Ivory Tower
Suspicious minds
In his new book, "The Dangerous Passion," psychologist David Buss proposes that jealousy is an evolutionary necessity.
By Annie Murphy Paul
[02/14/00]

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This latest effort to expand tax benefits for those paying tuition purports to build bridges of opportunity to the 21st century. Yet for all the egalitarian talk, working-class and minority Americans are being shut out of higher education at an increasing rate -- by the very programs claiming to open the door. That's because tax breaks benefit only those who can 1) initially come up with the cash for which they'll later be reimbursed and 2) pay enough in taxes to qualify for the credits in the first place. That leaves out the truly disadvantaged.

Nowhere in Clinton's rhetoric will you hear who the real beneficiaries of his latest college-financing program are: the middle- and upper-middle classes. Voters. The people who, by and large, do not fill out E-Z tax return forms. The plan won't increase by one student the number of kids attending college; it will just make it easier for the kids who are already going.

"Tuition breaks written into the tax code ... amount to a new entitlement for middle- and upper-middle-income citizens," says Larry Gladieux, executive director of policy analysis for the College Board. Meanwhile, the Pell grant, which targets low-income students, still lacks guaranteed financing from year to year, and increases have come slowly and in small increments.

Clinton's latest budget, for instance, proposed raising the maximum Pell award just $200 to $3,500 -- which means Pell buys about $1,000 less of a college education than it did in 1978. "Right now the whole system is tilting toward the middle- and upper-middle class," Gladieux says. "It needs a better balance."

If Clinton really wanted to boost college opportunity, he'd deliver his next speech from the home of Jerry and Penny Robertson in the Roanoke, Va., neighborhood of Norwich.

Not long ago I drove to Norwich in my Volvo station wagon, a car so safe and durable -- so the Volvo salesman assured me when I bought it -- that my toddler son would one day drive it off to college. The salesman had sized me up and assumed that my kids would go to college.

Nobody assumes that about kids from Norwich -- eight blocks of overgrown lots and single-story, shotgun houses where yard sales are ubiquitous. Homeless people and residents of a housing project loiter the streets, and smokestacks belch from a nearby foundry. It is said that no kid from Norwich had ever gone to college before the Robertsons' daughter Theresa came along. Five years ago, Theresa promised college admissions counselors that she would overcome her origins as the daughter of a truck driver and a hospital receptionist and be the first in her family to graduate from college. Both she and her sister qualified for full financial aid.

Neither Penny nor Jerry Robertson attended college; Jerry dropped out of school in the eighth grade. But the Robertsons valued education and realized when Theresa was 4 -- and read aloud a billboard sign that said "Southern Refrigeration Corporation" -- that education might be their daughter's ticket out of poverty.

And so it is proving to be. Theresa recently moved to a tony apartment in Santa Barbara, Calif., where she works for a software-development company.

Theresa graduated in June 1999 from Harvard University with a 3.3 grade-point average and a dorm award honoring her for "exemplifying what a Harvard student should be." The diploma came courtesy of a lot of hard work and all-nighters. But the chance to study with this country's finest minds, at a cost of $32,000 a year, was provided by a Pell grant, Theresa's work-study job, some private scholarships, student loans and an anonymous donor who'd read about Theresa's academic talents in her local newspaper. Lacking any of these piecemeal bits of funding -- not to mention the ability to tough out an environment where her classmates summered abroad and, as she put it, had the "luxury to sit around all day and deconstruct Marx" -- Theresa would not have been able to attend Harvard.

The College Opportunity Tax Cut plan would not have helped her family. Because tax benefits work retroactively and because low-income families don't pay enough in taxes to qualify for tax credits, Clinton's plan would have made no difference in her success story.

The government's shift in higher education funding does not consider people like Theresa Robertson. Hope and Lifetime Learning tax credits (of which the College Opportunity Tax Cut plan is an expansion), prepaid tuition programs, merit-based scholarships and emphasis on student loans rather than grants -- these initiatives are all targeted to middle-class kids who would be attending college anyway.

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