Tamar Lewin, writing for The New York Times (07-09-06, etc.), more encompassing than others reporting on the subject, analyzed the phenomenon. Facets of class, race and economics, among others, were all considered, but with only one throw away mention to which is a substantial cause to this highlighted disparity: incarceration.

The incarceration of huge numbers of citizens not only impacts the potential student pool, but also adversely affects the costs for those still free to matriculate. The barely mentioned factor of incarceration – and altogether overlooked related financial aspects – has not been placed in context nor analyzed for its rippling impact.

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As a whole, the United States has the highest per capita incarceration rate, imprisoning one-quarter of the world’s prisoners with less than five percent of the planet’s population, but moreover proportionally incarcerating nearly ten times the number of black males than South Africa did during the height of apartheid.

This shift in state resources from supporting colleges and universities to funding the expansion of the prison-industrial complex has been a driving cause behind the 202 percent average tuition increase at public universities, compared to the 80 percent inflation rate in the Consumer Price Index over the past twenty years.

As tuition rated accelerated faster than wage growth, family incomes, particularly those in the lower quintiles, have not kept pace. Nationally, tuition for the public universities now consumes one-quarter of poor families’ total income, double what it was two decades ago. Financial aid packages have not

The current cause célèbre in higher education is the issue of the growing gender disparity between men and women enrolling in, and subsequently graduating from, the nation’s colleges. Articles and editorials in major news magazines and papers, lamenting the disappearing male co-ed, have us wondering "Where have all the boys gone?"

 commensurately increased to help alleviate the growing burden, further distancing those able to afford higher education and those not. The middle class, meanwhile, graduates in greater and greater debt, in the end subsidizing a penal system bloated beyond all comparative measure.

If these trends continue, warns Patrick Callahan, president of the National Center for Public and Higher Education, "increasing numbers of students may be discouraged from attending" college, with most of them being poor.

This is already transpiring. In 2002, over 400,000 high school graduates were unable to afford enrollment at California public universities – once the national leader in affordable state-supported higher education and now as the largest penal colony among the commonwealths spends more on prisons then on colleges – with 170,000 potential students even locked out of less expensive community colleges as well. Millions more throughout the country, many to have been the first in their families to have matriculated, are facing similar ivy hall lock out.

Thus, a perfect storm of poor public policy decisions is creating a growing segment of post-secondarily excluded Americans, whether they are incarcerated or not.