Photo courtesy of flickr user acidcookie.
I’ve got a new piece published at TomDispatch.com today about the crisis of college affordability sweeping throughout higher education, from community colleges to elite, four-year public and private colleges and universities.
It’s a crisis that’s been long coming. The Pell Grant, created in 1972, was the last real effort to democratize access to higher education, and since then colleges and universities have only shut out lower-income students with skyrocketing tuition costs (which have increased at five times the rate of the median household income in the past 30 years) and admissions/aid practices that target affluent, high-achieving students and choke off aid to the equally talented from less affluent backgrounds.
The Obama administration has taken some optimistic first steps toward addressing this crisis, funding increases in the Pell Grant and a $2.5 billion program to increase access to higher education for lower-income students.
But these are only a first step.
30 years of rising college costs will have to be addressed, and now is the time do it before higher education begins to look more like a gated community and less like a cross-section of the population.
A preview of my story is below. You can read it in full at TomDispatch.com; just click on the live link below in the piece’s title. And please don’t hesitate to send any comments along. I’d love to hear what you have to say.
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Shut Out: How the Cost of Higher Education Is Dividing Our Country
TomDispatch.com
A FEW MONTHS AGO, Bobby Stapleton, a 21-year-old student at the University of Michigan, received a phone call from his younger brother. The good news came first: a senior in high school, he, too, had been accepted by the university, the fourth sibling in his family to have the opportunity to make the move to Ann Arbor from rural Hemlock, Michigan.
Then came the bad news: his brother had no intention of telling their parents, because as Bobby put it, “he knew the money just wasn’t there anymore, and that it wasn’t realistic.” The financial crisis had plunged the Stapleton family into severe debt. At this point, paying Michigan’s modest (by college standards) $11,000 tuition for another child appeared unlikely. As his younger brother told their younger sister, Bobby recalled, “Things were just going to have to be different for the two of them.”
Since that moment, Bobby and his older sisters have tirelessly searched for a way to change that fate. He has sought advice from older relatives who attended the university, met with members of its financial aid office, and explained his brother’s situation to officials at the Michigan Education Trust, a statewide tuition payment program; all this in addition to a full class schedule and a dormitory dining-hall job that often keeps him at work until one or two in the morning. Still, Bobby wasn’t about to give up. “I can truly say that being part of this university is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.” He was, he swore, going to do everything he could to make sure that his brother and sister had that same opportunity.
Engines of Inequality
Welcome to the other crisis spreading quietly across the country: the crisis of college affordability. Talk to enough students and families on a college campus like the University of Michigan, where I’m a student, and you’ll hear plenty of stories like Bobby Stapleton’s — of families scraping by in increasingly tough times as tuition bills rise, of students working second and third jobs, of newly minted graduates staggering into an ever more jobless world under the weight of tens of thousands of dollars in student-loan debt. …
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