The $$$$ cost of American college: a fix?

Aaaaaaah, the “promise” of higher education!

 

By Caitlin Kelly

I generally avoid wading into political issues here  — we get enough of that elsewhere! — but this is a subject I care a lot about, the skyrocketing costs of American university/college education. In an elbows-out nation addicted to capitalism, being hampered in any meaningful way from being able to compete effectively for well-paid work is a huge problem.

Many colleges now charge $60,000 (!) a year, to a wealthy family mere pocket change — and for many others, an unfathomable sum to assume. That’s assuming only undergrad, not graduate school or further professional training.

I taught in 2014-2015 at Pratt Institute, a private college in Brooklyn, to students who had decided that paying $60,000 a year to study writing was a wise investment.

But seriously?

Few writers, whether of fiction, poetry or journalism, will ever earn $60,000 a year; a very fortunate few will make it to that level and beyond, and generally those who were able to afford and attend and graduate from Big Name Schools. Hence the crazed arms race to get into them, which will likely send a few celebrities to prison for paying bribes for this purpose.

I recently read the comments of an entry-level newspaper reporter — yes, a “real job” — paying $14/hour.

Yes, there are state schools.

Yes, you can spend the first two years at a community college and save a lot of money and transfer for the name on your diploma.

But still.

It shocks me deeply — in a nation that fetishizes college (they never call it university) as the golden key to prosperity –– that student debt is the only form of indebtedness you can’t discharge by declaring bankruptcy.

I know people in their 40s and beyond (!) who still owe a significant sum on loans they took out decades earlier.

Here’s potential Democratic Presidential candidate, Senator Elizabeth Warren, with her bold proposal, published on Medium to help millions of American shed this burden:

An excerpt:

 

Higher education opened a million doors for me. It’s how the daughter of a janitor in a small town in Oklahoma got to become a teacher, a law school professor, a U.S. Senator, and eventually, a candidate for President of the United States.

Today, it’s virtually impossible for a young person to find that kind of opportunity. As states have invested less per-student at community colleges and public four-year colleges, the schools themselves have raised tuition and fees to make up the gap. And rather than stepping in to hold states accountable, or to pick up more of the tab and keep costs reasonable, the federal government went with a third option: pushing families that can’t afford to pay the outrageous costs of higher education towards taking out loans.

The result is a huge student loan debt burden that’s crushing millions of families and acting as an anchor on our economy. It’s reducing home ownership rates. It’s leading fewer people to start businesses. It’s forcing students to drop out of school before getting a degree. It’s a problem for all of us.

 

I first saw this piece posted on Twitter — where, not surprisingly, it had gathered 17,741 re-tweets and 66,877 likes.

I paid $660 a year in the mid 1970s to attend University of Toronto, Canada’s top school. Today, resident tuition for and arts & sciences undergraduate is about $5,000.

Not $50,000.

That four-year degree gave me the self-confidence and skills to compete effectively against the most expensively groomed and educated writers in New York, the publishing capital.

But if I had graduated burdened by decades of debt, my life — and my career — would have looked very different. Jose, my husband, had all four years at New Mexico State paid for because his father was a Baptist minister in Santa Fe. He, too, rocketed out of school with a degree, a ton of ambition and the freedom to take chances and learn needed professional skills wherever he best could.

We were really lucky.

Success should not be predicated on luck.

Are you — or your kids — saddled with American college debt?

 

How does it affect you?