laura.fo

From MSNBC:

"Every day I wish I had never gone to college," Castillo said. "It has been the biggest mistake of my life. Sometimes I wish I had gone to prison instead of college. At least I would have learned a trade or two and started being independent once I got out."

This article references StudentLoanJustice.org, a site I've been hearing about more and more lately.

It seems to me there are several different conversations that should be happening simultaneously, but rarely are. One is the issue of student loans. But another is the cost of tuition, which varies wildly from "free" in some state systems to over $36,000/year at some private institutions. Even within the public system, it depends a lot on what state you're in. I'm in Massachusetts, where public universities cost more than double what most public schools in the Midwest do. When I was at The University of Iowa about half the students were from Illinois, a choice they often made because paying out-of-state tuition to Iowa was cheaper than paying in-state tuition in Illinois. University of Iowa tuition has more than doubled since I went there, but that's still a bargain compared to UMass-Amherst.

I hear so much about tuition going up (which it is, and this is a huge problem across the board) but so often this is reported as though all schools have a similar starting line. Princeton was praised for "setting its lowest tuition increase in decades." Yay. Now it's a mere $47,020/year to go there.

But then of course there are endowments, which is why it can be advantageous to apply to schools that seem, on the surface, to be outrageously expensive. The richer the school, the more money they have to give — not loan, give — to incoming students. And not just students whose families are in dire straits. Is this common knowledge? I know my parents didn't understand it when I was applying to college. They'd look at a sticker price like $16,000 and think they'd be responsible for every penny, or that I'd have to take out loans to make up the difference. They didn't understand — and I didn't know either, and my guidance counselor never told me — that private colleges habitually write thousands of dollars off the initial cost. For this reason it can be cheaper to attend an ostensibly "expensive" private college than to go to a public school, since public schools, already subsidized, give their students less money in aid. But first you have to ignore the sticker price and apply there, which I think a lot of kids don't bother doing because it looks so hopeless.

Another conversation that needs to be happening here is the cost of living. My parents worked their way through school by bagging groceries part-time. Which was possible… in 1968. Not because tuition was so much cheaper, but because they weren't paying as much in rent. At one point I calculated that my first post-college job paid 6 times more than my mom's first post-college job (not adjusted for inflation), but that my rent was 24 times higher. If full-time workers at Wal-Mart are living in their cars because they can't earn enough to support themselves, there's no way students working there 20 hours a week could support themselves AND pay their college tuition. Yes, there are people who still work their way through college (I'm doing it now!) but they make other compromises along the way: they supplement their income with loans, they go part-time, they take time off, they get grants, they have spousal or parental help, they dip into their savings, or they wait until their "work" is the professional, full-time, salaried variety (which is still difficult to do on top of school, mind you, but not quite the Horatio Alger story of which my parents are so fond).

And this gets worse all the time. When I went to school in the early 1990s, my parents' story was no longer realistic but at least the $3.35/hour I earned at the library could pay my rent. It would only pay my rent, not my tuition, books, and food as well, but that still looks impressive in retrospect when I try to imagine my daughter paying for a Boston apartment on a part-time minimum wage job. At my previous job I'd get discouraged sometimes at how so many parents would try to talk their kids out of college — in some cases forcing them to forfeit impressive scholarships — but there was a real reluctance, in some cases panic, at the thought of losing a productive member of the household. Not only would it mean setting up a whole additional household for the student, but it meant losing their income, if they worked, or their labor, if they were the oldest child in the family and responsible for younger siblings. Financial aid will give you a break if you have two students in college at the same time, but they aren't going to factor in your newfound day care and afterschool costs for your younger children now that the resident 18-year-old is out of the house. Living at home while going to college is one solution, but that drastically limits your school options, and might also require buying a car.

And all of this assumes students really will be more employable after getting a degree than they were when the started. See above: the guy who wishes he'd gone to prison instead.

I still think college is important enough that I'd get depressed whenever it wouldn't work out for the kids I knew who really wanted to go and had so much promise, and I'm willing to do about anything to make sure my own daughter gets a four-year degree, assuming it's what she wants and she puts in the effort. But there are a whole mess of things going on here, and it's not enough to talk about any one of them in isolation. If and when the U.S. ever gets socialized health care I hope we can take a similar look at higher education.