With high school graduation looming, many parents are preparing to send their offspring off to college. Last year, 37 percent of Sonoma Valley High School grads went on to a 4-year college or university and 51 percent to a two-year college.
With hard work and a little luck many of those kids will achieve their higher education goals. We wish them the best, for the odds of achieving economic security without a college education, especially in the Bay Area, are becoming increasingly long.
The major hurdle many face is the sheer cost of college. Long gone are the post-WWII days of the GI Bill and a growing middle class fueled by an expanding post-war manufacturing economy, when a hard-working family could reasonably expect to provide their child a four-year public college education for around $10,000 – total.
The rising cost of higher education and loss of good-paying blue-collar jobs have throttled college access for many if not most middle class and poor families unwilling or unable to bear the crushing student debt which, according to MarketWatch, has surpassed $1.3 trillion dollars.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the average student loan debt of 2015 college graduates was $35,000, and that “(a)lmost 71 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients will graduate with a student loan, compared with less than half two decades ago and about 64-percent 10 years ago.” Quoting Mark Kantrowitz, publisher at Edvisors, a group of websites about planning and paying for college, “(a)ll together, total education debt — including federal and private education loans — will tally nearly $68 billion this year for graduates with a bachelor’s degree and their parents, a more than 10-fold increase since 1994.”
MarketWatch noted the impact of income inequality on the ability of students from low-income families to climb the proverbial ladder of success: “In 2014, just 10 percent of dependent family members who said they received a bachelor’s degree by the time they were 24 years old came from families in the lowest income quartile . . . By contrast, 54 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded to dependent family members went to those in the highest income quartile.”
Compounding matters, the value of Pell Grants – a key source of college funding for low-income students – has barely budged. In 1975, when average college costs were $8,858/yr., the maximum Pell grant was $4,690. By 2014, average college costs had risen 128 percent to $20,234/yr. while the maximum Pell grant rose only 18 percent, to $5,550.
Competition for college space is now global. Public U.S. colleges have long welcomed foreign students who pay higher out-of-state tuition, fortifying school budgets but taking spaces that might have gone to in-state US students. Some countries provide their citizens and, in some cases, international students tuition-free or low-cost college education, and increasing numbers of US students go abroad to study at foreign universities where many classes are taught in English.
Its cost has caused some parents to question the value of higher education. But in a global economy where good-paying work and educated workers easily leap borders, a college education is becoming the price of a secure middle-class life. Last year U.S. colleges graduated some 2,800,000 students; China alone graduated 7,500,000, many of whom speak fluent English.
–-Sun Editorial Board
Be First to Comment