Will the non-rich have more access to Stanford?

Following up on Stanford's announcement of a new financial aid policy that makes college positively cheap to the moderate-income, San Francisco Chronicle business columnist Kathleen Pender addresses the obvious next question: Who has access to Stanford anyway?

The elite schools hope their new aid policies will encourage more low- and middle-income students to apply. But "this doesn't guarantee they will enroll more low-income students," says Robert Shireman, executive director of the Project on Student Debt.

"They tend to use criteria that make it difficult for lower-income students to qualify. If you expect someone to have 10 (advanced placement) courses, been in the orchestra and traveled Europe, then you are going to have fewer low-income students who are able to meet those expectations in the first place. That is the next issue for these colleges."

(Speaking of such criteria, I'm fascinated with the trend for high-income students to do really expensive community service trips to work in Third World countries, both to do good in the world and to burnish their college applications. A young friend who attends Lick-Wilmerding, a high-end San Francisco private high school, said information circulated about a $3,000 trip to build housing in Uganda. He wondered if a bunch of unskilled high school students were really much use, and if it wouldn't be far more useful to the impoverished of Uganda to just send the $3,000.)