Essay by George Sibley
Education – June 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
I’M FINISHING UP a couple of decades in higher education this year. Yes, after 19 years at Western State College in Gunnison, I’m finally graduating. For the most part, this has been an excellent experience. Teaching has been interesting and usually enjoyable; the faculty have been good to work with; and the college gave me a lot of encouragement and freedom in developing programs to build better connections with the larger “headwaters” region.
And the students? They are a unique bunch from everywhere whose potential I think we’re still trying to figure out, but under its present president, Jay Helman, the college might find the way to lead and herd them into a niche of greatness in 21st-century, experience-based, environment-oriented, “post-urban” education. As Harvard and the other “resource and reputation” schools indicate, a college is only as good or as interesting as its students. Harvard’s are good but not very interesting, while Western’s are interesting and often good.
But one aspect of higher education has bothered me consistently, and it’s getting worse all the time. That’s the extent to which the whole enterprise, including my salary, is increasingly built on student debt. This is by no means only a problem at Western. In fact, with the lowest four-year tuition in the state, Western students probably graduate with less debt on average than most other students.
But what is true everywhere in higher education is true at Western, too, and that is the stark fact that between the time I was in college, forty-some years ago, and the present, this nation abandoned the idea that the adult generation owes the coming generation a good enough education to enable it to take over the maintenance and operation of a complex modern society.
When I was in school, about three-fourths of the financial aid to students was in the form of grants and scholarships, and less than one-fourth was in student loans. Today, that ratio has almost reversed; College Board studies show the ratio at about two-thirds loans to one-third grants and scholarships.
This led Terry Hartle of the American Council on Education to conclude, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “The social compact that assumed the adult generation would pay for the college education of the next generation has been shattered.”
What has basically happened is that the wealthiest segments (our financial institutions) of the wealthiest society in human history have figured out yet another way, besides the biggest national debt in human history, to further increase their wealth on the backs of the next generations. Instead of investing as a society in their education, we indoctrinate our kids into believing they need a “higher education,” then exploit that belief through student loans, to create yet another massive transfer payment from the have-littles to the have-mores.
This is worth bringing up now because recent events show the bottomless nature of this deeply venal enterprise. It was bad enough that the private financial institutions have been getting more than six percent interest from the students on guaranteed loans for which they assume no risk. Now it turns out that financial institutions have been bribing colleges and universities to get out of the federal direct loan program, which gives students a better break on interest, and also to let their foxes into the henhouse in order to advise the students.
This whole process is sold to the students and their parents on the premise that the student is the only beneficiary of education, maybe to the tune of a few hundred thou in additional lifetime earnings; therefore the student should shoulder the burden of paying for it. And being children of the “Reagan Revolution,” they accept this.
THE RESULT is what some analysts call “an indentured generation.” Nationally, the number of students graduating with significant debt has doubled over the past 30 years — from a third of all students in the mid-1970s up to almost two-thirds of students now — and the size of the debt (adjusted for inflation) has gone up almost 60 percent in just the last decade. In the mid-1990s students were graduating from four-year colleges with around $9,000 in debt; in 2005, according to the Project on Student Debt, the average debt load in Colorado for graduates of four-year colleges is over $16,000 — close to the national average. When one goes for the higher degrees, that escalates: The average total debt burden for those completing the Master’s degree is over $27,000, and the cumulative debt for terminal degrees often goes over $100,000, especially for professionals like doctors.
This obviously has major impacts on the lives of the graduates. A study conducted a few years ago for Nellie Mae, a major student lender (now a subsidiary of Sallie Mae, the elephant in this room) found that 38 percent of graduates held off buying their first house because of student debt, 14 percent put off marriage, and 21 percent delayed having children.
But it also has significant impacts for the larger society. Historically, college students and recent graduates have been a source of altruistic idealism — they’re people who “want to make a difference” and make things better. But leaving college with a significant debt which one has to start paying off within six months has a deadening impact on such altruism. A national Public Interest Research Group study found that today 23 percent of all graduates from public four-year colleges have “unmanageable” levels of debt (payments in excess of eight percent of income) if they accept the starting salaries offered in teaching school or social work, and 38 percent of graduates from private four-year colleges can’t “afford” to do that foundational work of the culture. In Colorado, it is even worse — 30 percent from public colleges and 48 percent from private carry too much debt to consider entry level jobs in the public service sector. For those with professional degrees — law, medicine, engineering, et cetera — work in the public or NGO/non-profit sector is often out of the question because of debt burdens.
How different it was, growing up under the legacy of the New Deal and the G. I. Bill of Rights. The dominant cultural belief then was best articulated by President Kennedy: “Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.”
Riding that tide, as the reasonably smart son of a middle-class family, I graduated with a total debt of $500 — mostly because I chose an irresponsible motorcycle adventure before my last year rather than working through the summer.
I WILL CONCEDE that we might have been given too much in that early post-war era. We may be the most spoiled generation — certainly this is suggested by the fact that we are the generation that, after having been almost given our educations, decided to keep the money and make our kids pay for their own.
We’re a schizoid generation. As individual parents, we feel the obligation; I helped my kids in college about as much as my parents were able to help me, but they still graduated with substantial debt, which I consider my debt too, and the final payments there will be my legacy to them when I pass on.
Isn’t there a better way than this wild pendulation from the perhaps excessive generosity of a boom-fueled “Great Society” to the meanness of Reaganomics?
More on this next month….
George Sibley writes from Gunnison, where he serves on the board of the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District.
