BY LAURA W. PERNA
According to a January 2020 Gallup poll, only 27 percent of adults in the United States believe that college is affordable. Democratic presidential candidates have responded to these concerns with proposals for free tuition at community colleges, student loan debt-forgiveness, and more. Some proposals, like increasing the amount of money that students can receive through Federal Pell Grants, recognize that paying for college is especially challenging for students from thelowest-income families.
Actions that improve college affordability may help more students from historically underserved groups enroll in college and remain enrolled through degree completion. Here is just one example of the persisting differences in college-related outcomes across demographic groups: analyses of data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 show that, even among high school students with math achievement in the highest two quintiles, college enrollment and persistence rates are lower for those from the lowest socioeconomic status than for those from the highest.
One reason that reducing the direct costs of college (like tuition) and increasing the availability of need-based grant aid (like Pell Grants) may improve college enrollment and completion is that they may reduce the need for students to work to pay for college while also attending classes. Employment is one of the few options available to pay the out-of-pocket costs of college for individuals who do not have sufficient personal savings, family income, or wealth. According to the US Department of Education, in 2017, 43 percent of full-time undergraduate students worked for pay while enrolled; among these working students, 63 percent worked more than twenty hours per week. Students from low-income families are more likely to work and, on average, work more hours.
Working for pay may help provide required financial resources, but working—especially working more than twenty hours per week—can also have important negative consequences for student outcomes. Working may slow time-to-degree, create stress (especially for students who are also parents or other caregivers), and reduce the likelihood of completing a degree.
To ensure that all students can fully engage in the college experience and make timely progress to degree completion, we must recognize—and respond to—the profound challenges that many college students are experiencing as they try to pay college costs. As Taylor Odle and I discuss in our new Academe article, “Recognizing the Reality of Working College Students,” federal policymakers, as well as state policymakers, college leaders, faculty, and administrators must do more to recognize the extent to which college students are working and take actions that minimize the harm, and maximize the benefits, of student employment.
Guest blogger Laura W. Perna is GSE Centennial Presidential Professor of Education and executive director of the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy (AHEAD) at the University of Pennsylvania. Her recent publications include Improving Research-Based Knowledge of College Promise Programs (2019, with Edward Smith) and Taking It to the Streets: The Role of Scholarship in Advocacy and Advocacy in Scholarship (2018).
Articles from the current and past issues of Academe are available online. AAUP members receive a subscription to the magazine, available both by mail and as a downloadable PDF, as a benefit of membership.
The writer may be missing entirely the underlying economic nature of the problem–the problem defined as tuition set at excessive ratios of likely wage earnings (leaving aside capital gains which are not reasonable to index or incorporate into payback criteria). That is, tuition can easily be a negative NPV proposition on strictly financial terms.
She makes no invocation of three primary cost drivers: university labor and operating costs (academic, staff and administrative including benefit and retirement commitments); real estate operations; and discretionary spending (sports, travel and entertainment, and a dozen other primary categories). These cosst are all subsidized by tuition, and student debt, now reaching over $1.6 trillion nationally, with over 40% of that total, in some form of arrears, deferment or default, and growing.
Readers may appreciate two recent media opinions I wrote on this subject, referencing the University of Chicago, now the nation’s highest-priced undergraduate college: ‘Overhaul’ likely to mean business as usual at the University of Chicago’ 9 May 2019 (https://www.ft.com/content/2676282a-70f1-11e9-bf5c-6eeb837566c5) and “In Light Of Tuition Hike, University Needs More Financial Transparency,” 11 August 2019 (https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2019/8/11/light-tuition-hike-university-needs-financial-tran/).
University of Chicago’s president, Robert Zimmer, is perhaps the effective poster-child of the modern university cost spiral and self-dealing problem, while alienating faculty and graduate students alike, creating poor morale, and especially, difficult institutional adaptation and progress including in student tuition and finance calculus. Regards. Matt Andersson, ’96, UChicago Booth School of Business