Some facts:
Assuming you can even afford to eat and pay your bills while also paying for college, is it worth being saddled with a lifetime of debt? Is a college education unattainable for a significant proportion of America's young adults?
If the United States were a country in which a high school education was sufficient to get a stable job and build a middle-class life, the answer to those questions might be "no" and "does it matter?"
But consider the following facts:
- The advantages of having a bachelor's degree have not included rising wages—between 1980 and 2008 the median annual income for a man aged 25-34 with a bachelor's degree, working full time, rose less than $3,000, adjusted for inflation, going from $52,300 to $55,000. (And in 2009 it fell to $51,000.)
However, by comparison with a man with a high school diploma or GED, the man with a bachelor's degree has moved significantly ahead, in financial terms. That's because in 1980, the median annual earnings of a man aged 25-34 with a high school diploma or GED were $44,200. In 2008, that number was $32,000.
- In 2010, the unemployment rate for people over 25 with bachelor's degrees was 5.4%. For people with high school diplomas, it was 10.3%.
- According to Tamara Draut:
In 1977, there was only a 6 percentage-point difference in home-ownership rates between those with college educations and those without. Today, there is a 20 percentage-point difference.
Put in that context, the cost of not having a college degree looks pretty high, student loan debt or no. So that's the Catch-22: Low income, high chance of unemployment, or better income, less chance of unemployment, but high chance of major debt?
This obviously hurts individuals, en masse. It's obviously—to my eyes, at least, and I hope to yours—a moral problem for our country. Should this be a country where you can only have a reasonable expectation of getting a middle-class job if your parents can afford to pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition per year? But it's also an economic problem to have talented people unable to afford to attend or finish college and to have educated people hobbled by debt. Like having health insurance be exorbitantly expensive and tied to employment, educational debt limits the choices people can make about their work and their lives, placing more power over the lives of working people into the hands of employers.
And in today's poisoned political atmosphere, this all seems like a knotty, difficult set of problems, one that would require confronting some things our society is loath to confront, such as the stagnation and backward movement in wages brought on by the class war being waged from above.
Still, knowing the answer isn't that difficult: Until a generation or so ago, a high school education was sufficient to make a solid, middle-class living. Today, a college education is all but required (though not necessarily sufficient) for that income level. Public high school has been free for generations, and became so as a high school education became a requirement of entry into the middle class; why does public college, which is effectively a requirement of entry into the middle class, cost more than $12,000 per year?
One answer to this problem would be reversing the decline in student financial aid. Currently:
Forty-seven percent of all undergraduates received federal student aid in 2007–08, the average amount of which was $6,600. Sixteen percent received an average of $2,500 in state-funded grants and 20 percent received an average of $5,000 in grants funded by the postsecondary institution they attended.
In 2007–08, federal Pell Grants were awarded to 27 percent of all undergraduates at an average of $2,600, and 34 percent of all undergraduates took out federal Stafford loans averaging a total of $5,000. Subsidized Stafford loans were received by 30 percent of undergraduates and averaged $3,400, while 22 percent received an average of $3,200 in unsubsidized Stafford loans.
That means that the average Pell Grant pays for 21% of the average public university tuition. By contrast, Tamara Draut writes in Strapped, in the 1970s the average Pell Grant paid for nearly three quarters of the cost of a four-year college.
Returning to that 1970s rate and having the 27% or so of students receiving Pell Grants get in the neighborhood of 70% of their tuition, not 21%, would be a substantial advance. Expanding the availability of grants as opposed to loans would be another major advance—if the entire 47% of students receiving federal aid were getting grants worth 70% of their tuition, it would dramatically reshape the landscape of who was able to attend college and how much debt they graduated with.
Additionally,
the for-profit college industry has grown substantially in the past decade by targeting underprivileged students who qualify for federal loans. Many of these students drop out before graduating or can't find the types of jobs that will allow them to repay their loans, leaving them with staggering debt.
These for-profit colleges aggressively advertise and have a history of making false claims about the education they provide and the job prospects of their students. If prospective students knew that the federal aid they qualified for would be enough to attend their local public college, for-profit colleges would have a harder time playing on fear and insecurity.
But why stop by just making college more affordable? As I mentioned earlier, a college degree now fills the role high school did in past generations: it's an essential qualification for most middle-class employment. Sure, some people are lucky enough or talented enough or have a specialized skill that let them do well without a college degree, but the statistics show that for the vast majority, an education ending with a high school diploma means lower income and greater chance of unemployment. So why not treat college as the new high school when it comes to tuition?
Dan Clawson (disclosure: my father) and Max Page write that:
The cost for the federal government to pay all the tuition and fees paid by all students, at all public higher education institutions, would have been $44.8 billion in the 2006-07 academic year (National Center for Education Statistics, Table 352), the most recent year for which the data have been reported.
They acknowledge that, in fact, if free public higher education were instituted as a policy, it would cost more than $44.8 billion not just because of rising tuition costs but because more people would go to college (a good thing). But $100 billion is just a few months of the Iraq war, circa 2008. Rolling back the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest would take care of the majority of it. Of course we already have a long wish list for that money. But what if we went back a little further?
According to Sam Pizzigati of the Institute for Policy Studies points out that a return to 1961 tax rates would raise $382 billion, and more audits of the highest-income tax payers could push it up to half a trillion dollars. For one-tenth of that, we could pay the tuition of everyone in public colleges and universities in the most recent year for which data is available. For one-fifth of it, we could double access to public higher education and still have it be free.
That would mean people who currently can't attend college being able to do so, people graduating from college who today would drop out because they can't manage to be a full-time student and a full-time worker at the same time, people graduating without tens of thousands of dollars of debt looming over them. It would mean an empowered, less fearful workforce.
No, Congress will not be passing this any time soon. But just because our politicians think small doesn't mean we have to.