CEHD News

Non-traditional students who attend college through open enrollment generally do well and their success carries forward to the next generation, say Paul Attewell and David Lavin, who have won the 2009 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education.

Attewell and Lavin, both sociology professors at City University of New York’s Graduate Center, were selected for the prize from among 14 nominations worldwide.

In their award-winning 2007 book, “Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations?” Attewell and Lavin tracked nearly 2,000 disadvantaged women who entered CUNY through open enrollment in the early 1970s. When they interviewed the women three decades later, they found more than 70 percent had graduated and boosted their income, and that their children also had better educational success.

Data from a U.S. Department of Labor study tracking the effects of college attendance on several thousand women from 1979 to 1999 supported their findings.

Study participants were selected to equally represent whites, blacks and Hispanics. The researchers calculated that the annual dollar benefit to each woman averaged about $9,700 for whites, $5,000 for blacks and $7,900 for Hispanics.

“The study shows that opening college to disadvantaged students doesn’t lessen the value of degrees or hurt institutions of higher education as some have feared,” said Bill Bush, a UofL professor of education who directs the award. “In fact, it shows quite the opposite.”

The Grawemeyer Foundation at UofL annually awards $1 million — $200,000 each — for outstanding works in music composition, ideas improving world order, psychology, education and religion. Winners of the other Grawemeyer Awards are being introduced this week.