Senate Colleges and Student Loans in the U.S. and Elsewhere

The issue of college education and student loan debt has always been a thorny one here in the US. I've read many news stories where people my age are in debt up to their eyeballs and simply shake my head. What are these people being sold? College is not a place to party, it's a place to study! What do you think? Is there any hope of drumming some sense into these young men and women, or will they continue racking up massive debts for a piece of paper that isn't really needed?

 

Well, there's a few problems, and this is far from just the fault of the college students, although I don't think they're absolved of responsibility, either.

Going back a few decades, a relatively small portion of the population. If you go back to the 1950s, it was something under 10% of the population. At that time, having a college degree, and also making connections from it, was very useful and there were enough jobs that required this level of training to go around. Plus, it was a relatively affordable thing, compared to today. By the time you reach the 1970s, the number increases greatly ( I'd speculate it's due to the Vietnam War) and it starts to approach saturation. The percentage of 25-29 year-olds now that have a Bachelors degree now is approaching 30%. This is in part driven by the fact that to past generations, college of any kind WAS a bit of a guarantee of a good job simply because so few people graduated college. As demand increased for college educations so did the cost of it as states divested themselves of much of the funding, and it's surpassed the number of jobs that legitimately need a college degree.

We've now reached a point that simply having a college degree isn't a guarantee of employment, while the cost of doing so has greatly increased, so there's a much bigger initial debt, and there's also a greater risk that that bet won't pay off. The advice that high school students are being given, though, is still that of the 1950s, and to an extent it is valid because now college degrees are becoming a factor in jobs that never would have required those degrees in the first place.

The view that is needed at this point, is realizing the role of college at this point. Many view college as simply a guarantee of a job, but that depends on the major and if it's oversaturated or not. There's also some people that would be much better served going with a trade school and working in more blue-collar jobs that have fewer people going into them with this college focus yet are still well-paid jobs because of the skills involved (electricians, plumbers, etc). There's also too great a cost now to treat college as a simple expansion of one's horizons or a hobby without having independent funds. There needs to be a bigger focus on IF college is necessary for a job in the careers they want to pursue, and also if their majors are going to be useful for that. There also would be a benefit from more people looking into colleges that are affordable, such as state colleges where it can be more affordable, and I do find it hard to be terribly sympathetic for people that chose to go to very expensive schools but now want to complain about how unfair that was since there are cheaper options out there that can be tens of thousands less a year.

That said, as a long run solution, I would love to see a return to the educational policies of the past where a college education was made much cheaper, if not free, in majors that would have direct benefits for society (such as teachers, especially math and science) while also working on changing the notion that college is simply "what you do" after high school without examining if that's the right choice, and also promoting the benefits of community colleges and trade schools much more in a very across the board scenario. College does not make sense for everyone, and we really should be more open about that, and help those that still want to go through a 4 year university so that they can do so without having to worry about avoiding debt or plunging in to large amounts of debt.

 

Just as an addendum to this, a meandering detour if you will a little off the topic: dealing with the 1950s, Sven Birkerts in his 1992 book The Gutenberg Elegies (specifically, the essay/chapter in that book The Western Gulf which in turn considers Leonard Trilling's essay The Liberal Imagination) makes the case that around the fifties -- which also coincides with the apogee of America's literary and intellectual culture -- that academic writers in the humanities at the universities were not just writing for one another, for other specialists as they do now.

Birkerts probably puts it better than I could: "Reading The Liberal Imagination ... we are most struck by Trilling's stance -- his tone, his references, the assumptions he makes about his audience. We may be surprised by the realization that he is writing not for his fellow academic but for the intelligent layman; that there was once a small but active and influential population of such readers, enough for publishers to count on, enough to support a literary culture outside the university radius. These readers were assumed to have a broad general acquaintance with literary classics -- James, Austen, Dickens, FLaubert -- as well as modern works by writers like Hemingway, Forster, Mann, and Sartre. They would have the rudiments of Freudian psychology, Marxist science, philosophy (certainly a smattering of Descartes, Kant, Bergson and Nietzsche), classical history (Tacitus, Polybius, Thucydides) and so on. Not a great deal to ask, but how many readers like that are out there now? Some, of course. But do we ever think of them as forming a constituency, as representing a cultural power, as representing anything besides a quirky exception to the norm? The isolated reader may remain, but the audience is gone and is not likely to reappear. And this loss impinges heavily, very heavily, on the quality of our cultural life. It assures that there will be a sharp split between extremes -- between an academic elite and a mass population -- with no mediating center."

 

My oldest son is going to college in the fall, so I had my first experience filling out the CSS profile, will fill out the FAFSA tomorrow morning. It looks to me like the best colleges in the country do a reasonably good job trying to limit student debt. I think for top students regardless of income, college is affordable - either at a top private school that is needs blind and offers great financial aid or at a good in-state school with tuition costs that are a tiny fraction of private school sticker price. For many middle income families, there may be no significant difference in cost between sending a child to a good private school and an in-state public school.

The problem this country has is finding low income students with potential and getting them to the point where they're prepped to be strong college applicants. There needs to be the equivalent of a Federal Head Start program that goes from pre-K through 12th grade. We're squandering some of the country's available talent and failing some of our smart low income kids.

Also, agreeing with Lowbacca's comments, the U.S. is terrible about dividing citizens and immigrants into "no future" groups: high school dropouts, high school grads on the one side of the divide, college grads, people with advanced and professional degrees on the other. I think there are other ways to identify the strengths and potential talents of children, and to guide them into an appropriate and rewarding vocation. As I've written in the past, I think Austria does an incredible job helping non college bound kids get into a rewarding and well-paying skilled vocation. There's a second track of schools for, say, pastry chefs, IT technicians and electricians that pulls them into an appropriate combined apprenticeship/highschool system at around 15, so they're getting classroom education and valuable job skills at the same time, and they graduate from these programs with the possibility of a decent paying career and a comfortable middle class lifestyle.

My wife's cousin in Austria was trained as a master carpenter starting at 15 and is now at age 20 earning a very decent living. America should value these careers more and do more to formalize training and education for them.

 

I graduated High school in 2002 and started college the same year (graduated in 2006, currently finishing a master's thesis slowly since I've already built a career). For most of the people I graduated with, I'm not sure that not going to college was ever really considered an option anymore than going to High school was an option after middle school. It was just always assumed. Being in grade school in the early to mid 90s, I have strong recollections of how many PSAs, presentations, and teachers always told me that college would be necessary. My parents never once allowed me to entertain the thought of not going to college. In high school I was quite interested for a period in going to a trade school but was disuaded from this by parents and teachers. Remember those posters that had the massive beachside house with a garage full of exotic sports cars and the words "Justification for a higher education"? Those were all over my elementary and middle school.

I think in the 90s it just seemed logical to get as many people into college as possible. Why not? Education was viewed really pushed in the 80s and 90s (and rightfully so) but there was some type of disconnect between understanding how a college education was different from a public education. My wife and I are pretty much the only two people around are age we know with no student loan debt. I had full scholarships for undergrad and most of my masters and my wifes parents had planned for her education early. I have friends who are professionals in their fields of study, friends who are successful in different fields, and friends who never finished that still live paycheck to paycheck because of crushing debt. It's crazy!

We have to really come to terms with the differentiation between general education and specific education. Of course, now there's an entire system in place that caters to parents who want to send their kids off to what in many ways has become high school part two. I'm very proud of the university I graduated from with my undergraduate degree and was a tour guide for them while attending, but I can't believe how many parents were constantly asking us about policies involving dorms, curfews, and other such aspects of campus life. Parents were often disappointed that our policies were not as strict as many other colleges they were looking at.

Now that I have a daughter (only four months) my wife and I have been having this discussion. While we've started a "Dream fund" for her, we're not calling it a college fund. I hope by the time she gets older that we've tackled this issue as a society, but I want her to find a career that makes her happy. If college is needed to pursue the career, then so be it. If it isn't and it's a tech school, trade school, or apprenticeship, then that works too.

 

Jabbadabbado, as far as it comes to preparing students, I think one of the biggest problems has been the focus on the idea that simply attending is good enough, so it's not really fair to not pass students and so there's a whole problem with social promotion. Several years ago when California introduced the concept of an exit exam, the argument against it was that it wasn't fair to have someone go to high school for 4 years NOT get a diploma because they were there the whole time. And it wasn't a trivial segment arguing this.

Granted, there's also a lawsuit in California alleging that students in poor areas are facing civil rights violations because the policies on firing teachers are so strict that teachers can't be removed, and so bad teachers tend to end up at schools with the least amount of prestige, and that tends to be in poor and minority areas. So we have a broken educational system well before college enters the picture.

Barbecue17, with what you mention about student debt, it greatly bothers me that, in any situation, people are being encouraged to take on debt without assessing if that debt is worth it. This is probably a much larger problem with American society than just education, but there seems to be little resistance to the idea that debt should be piled on. There's a lack of long term perspective on debt and really assessing if it's worth it or not. I think that shows up not just in how college financing is approached but from anything from the purchase to houses on down, as I think the recession showed.

 

Migrating U.S. high schools to the international baccalaureate diploma program solves the problem of social promotion. Students would be required to test out of high school here just as they do in almost every other country. My son's school district is making the switch, so my younger son will likely get the IB diploma. It will soon be a widely accepted test score for college admissions like the ACT and SAT.

 

The problem, though, is it starts way before then. There's too much of a focus, imo, on the idea that students 'should' move to the next grade, rather than if they're capable of it, and it puts them at a disadvantage and churns out students that have finished high school but aren't ready for college, even though they've been told that they are and that that's the next step. In part by the problems that Barbecue17 brought up

 

Yes, I really hope that we're getting to the first generation that tells their young kids that education beyond a certain point really should be prep for something specific. When I as younger and commented that college seemed silly if I hadn't done anything career wise yet, I was told not that college prepares you for a special field or position but that college shows you're of a higher quality and can finish something. High school is simply viewed as a social step, so those who graduate aren't really viewed as if they accomplished much. I'm always shocked by the jobs that require a college diploma. Not something specific but any college degree. That shows me that as a society we've really bought into the college as high school part two idea.

Once again, wouldn't some teenagers be better served by being given the opportunity to learn technical skills? There are definitely certain skills that everyone should learn, certain educational requirements that students be exposed to, and certain opportunities given, but why can't we be more open to the fact that not every high school student is best served by four courses of math, four courses of history, four courses of english, etc. Wouldn't it be fantastic if we had a larger percentage of kids coming out of high school with actual skills?

 

True. Mom works as a middle school substitute teacher, and she has to deal with 11-14 year old kids who can't do simple math, read at their grade level, or write well. If they can't learn to do these core subjects in middle school, much less high school, they sure as heck are not ready for college.