Price of College Too Steep
Posted by Truong on June 7, 2007
In a couple of weeks, thousands of local students will graduate from high school.
A couple of months after that, many of them will be starting college.
And four years after that, most of them will find themselves tens of thousand of dollars in debt.
Such is the ritual that’s becoming ever more problematic for our nation’s young people and their parents.
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College tuition is rising beyond most people’s ability to afford it. At the same time, college has become a prerequisite for most careers, meaning more high school students are being steered toward college as a way to get decent jobs. Because of the high demand for their services, colleges can charge whatever they want. They can also be more selective in who they accept and be more discriminatory about what kind of financial aid they hand out, and to whom.
High school guidance counselors say kids are not only having more difficulty getting into college because of the glut of students, but they’re also having to select colleges based not only on the quality of the education, but on what they can afford.
Many families cannot afford the $30,000 or $40,000 a year that it costs to send one child to college, let alone two or three. Then once they graduate, these students who are trying to establish careers and families — a time when they are struggling the hardest — find themselves crushed by their college debt.
According to the U.S. secretary of education, students are graduating with nearly twice as much education-related debt as they did a decade ago. In New York — where annual private college tuition averages $30,367 and public school tuition is about $13,000 — nearly three out of five undergraduates take out loans. The Public Interest Research Group found that nearly 40 percent of college students nationwide leave college with “unmanageable” debt levels.
What we have here is a crisis. And the solutions, while there are many being examined, aren’t coming fast enough.
Last month, Gov. Eliot Spitzer appointed a Commission on Higher Education to look at ways to improve higher education in the state.
Perspective students and their parents attend a Skidmore College open house in 2001. With the rising cost of college tuition, students and their parents must consider more and more what colleges the student can afford.
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In addition to boosting the quality and image of the state university system, the commission’s tasks include analyzing the financing of public universities, evaluating the role of community colleges, determining a reasonable cost of education, and evaluating the types and amounts of financial aid from provided by the state and federal governments, private sources, alumni and tuition.
In Congress, the Senate Finance Committee is working on ways to expand federal income-tax credits for higher education, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. To pay for the credits, the committee is considering limiting tax-free tuition benefits that colleges offer employees, taxing endowments, and perhaps initiating tuition price controls.
Last fall, the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education recommended a series of reforms that included boosting financial aid, restructuring the entire financial aid system to make it simpler, and boosting incentives for colleges to better manage costs.
Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand, for her part, has offered an amendment that would help financially strapped undergraduate students by offering scholarships if they enroll in science, technology, engineering and math programs. The amendment is still pending. And during her successful election campaign last year, Gillibrand advocated an income tax deduction of up to $10,000 a year for college tuition expenses.
State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has rooted out illegal relationships between colleges and loan companies that result in higher interest payments for students.
And locally, Adirondack Community College is working to make a bachelor’s education more affordable by expanding its relationship with four-year-colleges such as the College of St. Rose and Plattsburgh State. This summer, construction is expected to begin on a $7 million Regional Higher Education Center that will allow that relationship to expand.
But change is not happening fast enough to help the millions of students across the nation who will find themselves in this nearly overwhelming predicament in the coming years.
The state and federal government need to do more to reduce the onerous burden of tuition costs and student loans by reforming education assistance and re-evaluating the cost and operation of student loan programs.
And they need to examine the root causes of tuition hikes and seek ways to rein them in. In New York, that means encouraging state-operated colleges to operate more efficiently (cheaper) and ensuring that educational programs are worthwhile and relevant to the changing marketplace.
A bachelor’s degree is the high school degree of the 21st century. If students can’t afford that degree, then their futures are in jeopardy.
A lot is already being done. But there’s still a long way to go.
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Our view: Government needs to do more to rein in burden of higher education on families.
Source: PostStar.com
