With proposals like free tuition at public colleges, student loan forgiveness, and expanded support for historically black colleges, candidates for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president have signaled a keen interest in expanding access to higher education.

Given the central role that education plays in shaping socioeconomic status and political engagement, candidates’ interest in building on existing higher education policy precedents makes sense. Yet, lessons from the history of women’s participation in higher education in the U.S. suggest that the federal policies that are most effective in expanding access are those that move beyond small tweaks to existing systems to boldly address structural forces that limit opportunity.

Although college enrollments in the United States have increased over the last 50 years for both women and men, a number of barriers limit access to postsecondary degrees today, especially for students from low-income families and traditionally marginalized groups like racial and ethnic minorities.

To meet today’s challenges, lawmakers must turn to bold policy changes that are informed by a serious appreciation for the role that intersecting identities play in higher educational disparity.

To meet today’s challenges, lawmakers must turn to bold policy changes that are informed by a serious appreciation for the role that intersecting identities play in higher educational disparity.

The Building Blocks of Full Citizenship

Political scientists have long recognized the connection between educational attainment and opportunity. Those with higher levels of education tend to have higher socioeconomic status and are more likely to engage in political activities like voting, contacting elected officials, and volunteering for a political candidate or cause. Such outcomes are what political theorists would describe as the building blocks of full citizenship: equal access to economic opportunity, the capacity to participate fully in social life, and the ability to participate in the exercise of political power.

Policies like the 1958 National Defense Education Act; the 1965 Higher Education Act, which provided valuable financial aid; and the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, which outlawed race and sex discrimination in college admissions, respectively, helped to democratize access to the nations’ colleges and universities. In doing so, they expanded access to full citizenship for millions of students who absent government support would not have considered pursuing postsecondary education.

The Changing Gender Dynamics of Higher Education

Looking around college campuses today, it is hard to miss the fact that women are represented in full force. During the 2018-19 academic year, women comprised a full 56 percent of American college students. This powerful trend makes it easy to forget the long history of women’s marginalization in the nation’s colleges and universities.

From the establishment of postsecondary education in the colonies through the 1970s, men earned more college degrees than women. In 1910, men earned three times the number of undergraduate degrees that women did. In 1940, men continued to earn more bachelor’s degrees, even though women earned more high school diplomas, and by 1960, there were still 1.6 men for every woman enrolled in an undergraduate program. This gap began to change during the 1960s, and in 1981, women earned more college degrees than men for the first time. This trend has continued unstinted in the years since.

Support from the federal government has been one of the main forces that has helped to expand women’s access to postsecondary degrees.

Support from the federal government has been one of the main forces that has helped to expand women’s access to postsecondary degrees. Before the 1960s, when families with limited resources were faced with the task of funding higher education for their children, they often chose to invest in sons’ education, rationalizing that sons would likely become breadwinners for their families, while daughters would likely exit the labor force upon getting married and having children. By providing generous tuition benefits to returning World War II veterans during a time of military conscription, the G.I. Bill significantly expanded higher education access for a generation of American men, while doing relatively little to support women’s access to college.

Seven years later, however, the federal government provided broadly accessible, need-based student loans and grants under the 1958 National Defense Education Act and the 1965 Higher Education Act; and later outlawed race and sex discrimination in college admissions with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Title IX in 1972.

By helping to remove financial need and institutional discrimination as significant barriers limiting women’s ability to pursue college degrees, these landmark education policies paved the way for women’s rapid movement into U.S. higher educational institutions. In doing so, they contributed to women’s movement toward full, first-class citizenship.

By helping to remove financial need and institutional discrimination as significant barriers limiting women’s ability to pursue college degrees, these landmark education policies paved the way for women’s rapid movement into U.S. higher educational institutions. In doing so, they contributed to women’s movement toward full, first-class citizenship, enhancing their ability to participate in the economy and social life, and providing knowledge and skills that promote high levels of political engagement.

Increases in women’s political engagement have occurred in tandem with increasing educational achievement. Women have voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980. We have also seen a significant narrowing of the gender gap in the rates at which women and men express high levels of political interest, attempt to influence how others vote, and contribute money to political campaigns, and volunteer for a political party or candidate.

What’s Next for Access and Equality?

Candidates for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president have expressed support for programs like free tuition at public colleges, student loan forgiveness, and expanded support for historically black colleges. While such programs have the capacity to expand educational opportunity by building on tried-and-true policy precedents, they reflect an approach to policymaking that will likely fall short of achieving the broad-reaching expansions of access that lawmakers achieved during the mid-20th century.

The difference between these proposals and pathbreaking policies like the National Defense Education Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Higher Education Act, and Title IX is that those policies used unconventional strategies to address the central barriers to women’s and racial minorities’ higher educational opportunity at the time. While existing higher education policies had offered modest government support for infrastructure or vocational programming, the watershed policies of the mid-20th century offered unprecedented financial aid for students and created regulations that prohibited institutions from engaging in discriminatory admissions practices.

Many contemporary higher education proposals revolve around the problems of the mid-20th century, failing to take full stock of today’s barriers to educational opportunity.

Many contemporary higher education proposals revolve around the problems of the mid-20th century, failing to take full stock of today’s barriers to educational opportunity. Today, school districts with large populations of students of color tend to receive less funding than those that are predominantly white and affluent. Results from the ACT college admissions test suggest that high school graduates who are African American, American Indian, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Hispanic are less likely than their white and Asian American counterparts to demonstrate college readiness upon graduation. Moreover, declining government support for public colleges and universities limits their ability to offer financial and institutional support to vulnerable student populations. And, as sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has pointed out, for-profit colleges often target these students for risky educational programs.

To achieve sweeping expansions of educational opportunity for the most marginalized students, today’s policymakers must develop proposals that grapple with our most formidable contemporary barriers to higher educational opportunity, such as unequal access to quality K-12 education and unequal funding of schools, unscrupulous behavior on the part of for-profit colleges, and declines in state and federal support for public colleges and universities. As history shows us, substantial expansions of higher educational opportunity come not simply through incremental changes to existing programs but through bold efforts to address the day’s biggest barriers to equal opportunity.