As college students return to classes this week, William Chace has some gloomy news. Writing in The New York Times, the former president of Emory and Wesleyan warned: “How will many of you begin your adult lives? In serious debt.”
He’s right, and the debt problem is getting worse. The average student graduates today owing $19,000 in loans, up from $12,000 in current dollars 10 years ago. About 1-in-10 owes $40,000 or more. Add in graduate school, and loan obligations can easily top $100,000.
A serious class conflict divides the nation’s campuses. On one side are privileged grads entering the work force debt-free because Mom and Dad foot the bill; on the other are students shouldering huge loan burdens. “It’s a real crisis,” Diana Cantor of the Virginia College Savings Plan told USA Today. “You’re strapped before you get started.”
As a professor at George Washington University, Steve sees evidence of this crisis every day. Wealthier students can afford to take unpaid internships that provide invaluable career advancement. Kids who wait tables to pay their bills can’t do that.
More seriously, students graduating with large loans face severely diminished career choices. They simply can’t afford to take jobs that provide psychic rewards instead of financial ones. According to a study by the Public Interest Research Group, more than one-third of all private college grads can’t pay back their loans on a teacher’s salary, and more than half can’t afford to be social workers.
Instead of easing this unfairness, Congress and the Bush administration are actually adding to it. On July 1, a new bill raised the interest rate on Stafford loans – the primary program for undergrads – from 5.3 per cent to 6.8 percent. PLUS loans, which go to parents not students, zoomed to 8.5 percent.
Meanwhile, over the last three years, Congress has failed to increase funding for Pell grants, the main direct-aid program. The maximum grant is stuck at $4,050, while the average annual cost at a private university has risen to $32,000. Even public colleges cost about $15,000.
Consider one of Steve’s former students, Monica T., daughter of a Portugese immigrant with a grade-school education. A brilliant and determined young woman, she enrolled in law school with one goal: to go back to New Jersey and serve her community as a street lawyer. But will her dream be crushed under a mountain of debt?
Actually, Monica is one of the lucky ones. With middle-income wages stagnating, rising tuitions and loan payments are keeping other deserving students out of college entirely – just as global competition increases the nation’s need for well-schooled workers.
