Higher Education Dreams: Down to the Last Drop?
College is arguably the best four years of your life. But, with the recent economic crisis, some are saying students will be lucky if they even get there. Lack of student loan money is the main problem, but there’s a whole other slew of issues. Which makes me wonder…is the government doing anything about this yet? Should we maybe give, oh, I don’t know, a small portion of $700 billion to help fund students and colleges?
Somewhere, the next Bill Gates is sitting in a high school deciding that he doesn’t want to go to college because he can’t afford the tuition. Somewhere, a student who actually has an idea to invent something that will both produce jobs and make money (rather than just inventing new ways to make money on the stock market) isn’t going to go because she’ll decide that the closest college doesn’t have nice enough dorms. At least, that’s one theory out there.
“If a college decides we’re not going to have fancy dorms or build a shiny new gym, students are not going to that college,” says Sandy Baum, a Skidmore College economist and senior policy analyst at the College Board.
So that’s the bad news. The good news? Well, just ask U.S. News & World Report’s Kim Clark.
“There are still enough grants and loans for most students to afford at least a community college. And top students will still most likely qualify for plenty of aid from wealthy schools.”
OK, so poor/dumb kids can go to community colleges and really smart ones can go to rich, private schools? That’s messed up. And Clark’s article doesn’t stop there. She says parents can prepare for the following 4 things to happen:
- Tuition Hikes
- Decreased Savings
- Smaller Grants
- Fewer Loans (and zero from Key Bank).
That article is backed up by a report from Ithaca College’s newspaper. Apparently, banks actually “are freezing colleges’ accounts, public institutions are discussing raising tuitions and private schools are considering dipping into endowment funds to combat concerns about students being able to get loans.” Basically, things are bad and they’re very quickly getting worse.
I know it’s a bit of a stretch to blame all the problems of higher education on the financial crisis on Wall Street. College tuition has been increasing at a ridiculously high rate over the past few decades. I’m sure all of us are either A) In student loan debt ourselves or B) Know some close friends in pretty bad debt.
Maybe it’s time to fix the problem before it gets out of control. Or, at the very least, begin to throw out some ideas that might combat the downfall of higher education. Barack Obama is proposing a college tuition credit up to $4,000 for some students.
And here’s a fascinating CBS News piece from 2007 about an idea one school is doing in Michigan.
There’s got to be other suggestions out there. I, unfortunately, don’t have any. Do you?