Shauniqua Epps lives in subsidized housing in Philadelphia. Neither of her parents graduated high school. Her dad died when she was in third grade and her mother is on social security. But Shauniqua Epps worked hard. She earned a 3.8 GPA in high school where she was a varsity athlete, president of the student government, and had experiences as a volunteer and an intern. All this makes Shauniqua Epps sound like exactly the type of person who would qualify for financial aid. While she was admitted to three colleges, none of them offered her any financial help. It turns out Epps might have had a better shot at financial aid if she didn’t need any. ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education describe the new math of higher education. “It’s not just that colleges are continuously pushing up sticker prices. Public universities have also been shifting their aid, giving less to the poorest students and more to the wealthiest.”

+ The gap between the top 1% and the rest of Americans is wider than it’s been in more than a century. And it’s growing. “From 2009 to 2012, as the U.S. economy improved, incomes of the top 1% grew more than 31%, while the incomes of the 99% grew 0.4% – less than half a percentage point.”