Higher hopes of higher ed leaves higher degree of doubt

Thousands of Imperial County middle school and high school students over the past several days have taken part in Higher Education Week, the all-out push to increase college-going rates and awareness of the importance of post-secondary education.

Hey, no complaints here. It is a vital function of local educators to get that message out.

A bachelor’s degree is about as ubiquitous as a high school diploma once was, just ask many of your favorite baristas at coffee bars across America.

It’s a difficult time to be a college graduate in the United States. Many twenty-somethings are mired in seemingly insurmountable student loan debt, degrees that are proving useless in some cases and a whole middle-income range of jobs that college was once the golden ticket to that are practically nonexistent today.

Maybe “difficult time” isn’t quite the term. How about “scary”?

And really, no one — students and graduates with loans, their parents footing the bill — is in any position to do anything differently. College degrees are about the only fighting chance anyone has these days to rise above the unstable life of the working poor, of subsistence … into yet another unstable situation with different concerns altogether, including subsistence, when that debt eats up so much income that could be better spent circulating back into the economy.

There seems to be an entire system of higher education — of the financing of it, the revenue generated by it, governments’ subsidizing of it — that feels like it is teetering on the verge of collapse. What will it look like in 10 to 20 years from now, when many our own children are trying to figure out how to pay for it, when we parents are figuring out how to pay for it? Not all of us will have or will be Blue Chip athletes and academic all-Americans, graced with the ability for that magical and mostly elusive “free ride.”

But the melody to the song will remain the same, even as the tempo and rhythm changes beneath us. Every message and overture from parent to child, from teacher to pupil, will be, “Work hard, go to college, get that degree, find your path to success,” even though there will be fundamentally lingering and possibly worsening questions that go unanswered: “What will that path look like tomorrow? How will I pay? What jobs will be available to me? Will I be so heavy in student loan debt that I’m no better off than the high school grad or dropout working for minimum wage?”

Some of these are unrealistic, and worst-case concerns, but they remain real concerns nonetheless.

There are roughly 20 million Americans out there with some sort of student debt, whether through high-interest private loans or the subsidized state and federal loan system, and they account for around a trillion dollars. One could argue their lifetimes whether college tuition should be more heavily subsidized or existing debt forgiven completely, but the root of the problem doesn’t just lie in financing, but in private and public university overspending, government underfunding and the resultant increase in tuition that cannot keep pace with what Americans earn.

The Delta Cost Project by the nonprofit, nonpartisan American Institutes for Research has taken great pains to track the causes for the continuing rise of tuition across the board, in all forms of college.

Public schools not classified as significant research universities and community colleges, where more than 50 percent of nation’s students go to get educated, are suffering from continued state funding cuts, although college spending and costs in general are down. Higher tuition is filling the gap.

Public and private research universities on the whole have increased spending, lost government funding and increased tuition to offset the losses. About 47 percent of all students attend these schools.

Then there are the private research universities, particularly the private liberal arts colleges, where spending has outpaced tuition hikes because endowments and donor dollars have decreased so sharply so quickly.

In all instances it just means more, more, more — more money out of pocket, more student loans and debt, more unhealthy pressure and undue competition among our kids for scholarships, and the continued unaffordability of it all.

It is a vicious cycle, and there are neither clear solutions nor legitimate efforts to find them. Until then, however, we’re all going to continue to sing in the Higher Ed Week choir, because there we’ve yet to find a new tune.

This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, Sept. 26, 2014.