by George Lorenzo, Editor of the SOURCE on Community College Issues, Trends & Strategies
For a great story about how someone beat the odds and pulled himself up from poverty through higher education and sheer hard work and determination, beginning with community college attendance, see SOURCE Editorial Board member Terry O’Banion’s “I Am a Community College Student” essay reprinted in Community College Week. Terry’s longstanding upwardly mobile career as a leader in the community college sector spans 50 years, from living in a chicken coop as a boy to President Emeritus of the League for Innovation and currently Senior Advisor at Walden University.
I’m sure there are many stories of a similar nature to Terry’s, including my own featured in the earlier three-part series of this blog, in which hard-working community college students from poverty-stricken or low-income families pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. However, I also believe that the higher education playing field has changed dramatically since my days as a college student as well as since Terry’s, making the likelihood of such successes much harder to achieve than in years past.
Consider the following information from an article published inside the recent October 31 issue of Time Magazine, appropriately headlined “I Owe U.”:
- “The cost of college has soared 538% over the past 30 years. That’s more than four times the growth of consumer prices and almost twice the increase in health care costs.”
- According to the Economic Policy Institute, “the wages of those with a college degree have been roughly flat for 10 years.”
- U.S. student-loan debt has exceeded credit-card debt for the first time and is on track to reach $1 trillion. College graduates in 2011 are labeled as the “Most Indebted Class Ever.”
- Increased college costs, more borrowing, and a lack of good-paying jobs could result in long-term stunted economic growth in the U.S. as “today’s grads end up being too poor to start a business or buy a house or send their own children to a university.”
What does this all mean for the future of our adult society in the U.S.? Are we producing a large population of stressed-out, overly debt-laden people who can’t see the light out of their lower economic status, regardless of the degrees they earned?
In addition, how does this scenario play out for community colleges? You would think that enrollments would continue to be rising due to the simple fact that community colleges are more affordable, but that does not seem to be the case. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, for instance, made note of enrollments slowing down at community colleges. In another story from The Chicago Tribune, it was explained that a recent drop in enrollments at Illinois community colleges could partially be due to more financially strapped students choosing work over school.
I hate to sound like an alarmist, but the so-called “College Payoff” theme, whereby we are advising students that going into debt in order to ultimately earn a degree can be considered a wise pathway in the long term, looks like a bad idea. Instead, shouldn’t we be advising students who do not have any financial support to avoid going into deep debt and to work at whatever job(s) they can find and enroll in only those courses they can pay for out of their pockets combined with any aid they may qualify for through federal and/or state grants?
All these challenges also point toward a growing gap between the haves and have-nots. Are we increasingly becoming a society in which only the wealthy can go to a decent college or university? Many of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are students with lots of student-loan debt and no decent employment in sight. Are such examples of discontent the beginning of an unprecedented societal crisis or am I being overly alarmist?
Comments welcome….
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