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  • Refinancing the College Dream: Access, Equal Opportunity, and Justice for Taxpayers
  • Greg Dubrow (bio)
Edward St. John, Refinancing the College Dream: Access, Equal Opportunity, and Justice for Taxpayers. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 663 pp. Cloth: $44.95. ISBN: 0-8018-7265-0.

College access and affordability is an issue which has been on the social policy radar for quite some [End Page 427] time. Ensuring access to postsecondary education is an especially important policy question now, as "knowledge jobs" have replaced manufacturing work as the driver of the American economy. Edward St. John sets his book, Refinancing the College Dream: Access, Equal Opportunity, and Justice for Taxpayers, in an educational environment that is witnessing a widening access gap between the rich and poor while employment opportunities for people without a college education are shrinking.

The policy discussion in this book is wide-ranging, covering student financial aid policy, tax equity, K-12 reform, and school-to-college linkages. Rather than employing the dispassionate tone that generally accompanies such econometric studies, St. John marries the "dreary science" to a healthy dose of Rawlsian social justice philosophy. The result is a heartfelt study of the economics of financial aid in which St. John argues that the current system of student financial aid needs to be repaired.

This is an ambitious work. St. John acknowledges in the preface that at numerous times he gave thought to scuttling the project because of its complexity. If there is any criticism to be leveled at the book it is that, in trying to cover so much ground, St. John makes it difficult for the critical reader to gauge the effectiveness of his argument. The book is such a nuanced work that, St. John's patient explanations notwithstanding, it requires of the reader a fair amount of literacy on a number of topics ranging from public policy to social philosophy.

St. John begins by outlining a vision of social justice based on the work of the philosopher John Rawls. Rawls's principles of equal treatment for all and the responsibility of each generation to pass capital to the next are at the heart of St. John's framework: There should be access to education for all, with equal opportunity regardless of social strata, provided for by means of the efficient use of tax dollars.

Next, St. John asks us to rethink the common assumptions used to gauge the efficacy of educational policy. He outlines why commonly used social and economic theories and their indicators are insufficient to the task of effective policy analysis. St. John has four guiding assumptions. First, melding social justice theory with traditional economic theory and indicators bridges the gap between liberal and conservative policy frameworks. Second, this new framework can help resolve the inherent tension between social reproduction theory and the cross-generational uplift necessary to adequately ensure college access. Third, assessing how well student aid is working means understanding the role of academic preparation and the situational contexts in which people decide if and where to go to college and how they will pay. And finally, although policy is a primarily political process, the process should be informed by rigorous research.

His new set of guiding assumptions set the stage for a review of the student-aid policy shifts of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Using the Rawlsian-inspired framework to assess the outcomes of the policy shifts in each decade, St. John explains that, even though the 1970s were a period of equalization of educational opportunity through the creation of BEOG (later Pell) Grants and the expansion of loan programs, the net result of three decades of federal involvement in student aid was a growing opportunity gap between the wealthy, middle class, and poor, with taxpayer equity having been addressed only in recent years.

This historical review is followed by the introduction of a new framework, the balanced access model, by which to study the effectiveness of student aid. St. John contends that it is necessary to examine separately, but in relation to each other, the financial and social/academic factors that explain enrollment and persistence. He uses this framework to examine the college expectations, preparations...

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