Dylan Perfect, a WAHS alumnus of 2017, spends his mornings riding the bus from his parent’s home in Albany over to Corvallis, where he attends Oregon State University. There, he takes a few classes, takes advantage of the campus library and recreation center, and returns home.
Like thousands in his generation, Perfect has to find a way to balance the high cost of university tuition with finding a place to live, textbooks, and online access to course content. Perfect considers himself “quite fortunate when paying for college;” he can apply a staff discount because his father works for a state university, he is dual-enrolled at LBCC, and applied College Now and AP credit to his university transcript, allowing him to finish in just three years.
Perfect encourages students to do what they can to reduce college costs; he cites the FAFSA and Oregon Promise as “musts” and notes there “are definitely quite a few scholarships offered throughout the community for students of many different backgrounds, but you have to keep your eye out for them.” Nevertheless, he is clearly frustrated with the system, stating “when the cost of a four-year degree pushes past $100,000, it definitely becomes a barrier for entry for many prospective students. While going to college is probably never going to be cheap, I think it’s fair to say it should be affordable.”
Perfect’s struggle to find the right formula for college is commonplace, and many borrowers–44.2 million, to be precise–have turned to college loans as a way to finance their education. Over the past three decades, the cost to attain a college degree has gone up ten times over as colleges and universities have sent tuition and other costs soaring at well over the rate of inflation. Of these borrowers, a quarter percent owe more than $30,000 and a tenth owe more than $50,000. Though these figures include all debt–ranging from community college to medical school, the numbers are astonishing.
These soaring figures, mirrored nowhere else in America’s economy, leave people wondering why so many students have taken out this much debt to pay for a college degree over the past few decades–something which should not cost all that much more today than it did in the middle of the twentieth century.
Indeed, total public expenditures on higher education have never been higher. State funding for public universities reached a record inflation-adjusted high this decade, at 86.6 billion dollars. When accounting for the additional 34.3 billion spent by the federal government on its Pell Grant program–a subsidy for low-income students to attend college, almost two percent of public resources go to higher education.
Granted, university enrollment has risen by fifty percent in the past twenty years, meaning per-person public university expenditures are somewhat below their peak in the 1990s, yet this alone does not explain the rise in tuition–which has risen 1.6 percent more than inflation each year. The cost is hard to explain.
That said, a couple factors seem to be driving up the cost of college. According to the Department of Education , the number of administrators at universities has grown by sixty percent since the 1990s, significantly over the growth rate of professors–whose incomes have actually decreased since the 1970s. Secondly, some universities have raised their tuition so they can give certain students discounts. A school can target these discounts at the specific students they want to have attend. Additionally, the process of getting a college loan has become much easier. With no necessary qualifications to borrow thousands of dollars in student loans, colleges can raise their prices knowing students–desperate to attend–will borrow whatever it takes in pursuit of a degree.
The amount of loans–subsidized by the government or taken out privately–has risen dramatically, matching tuition increases nationwide. These dollars going into expanded loan programs simply feed right into the universities, while students end up no better off. It seems dubious such increases in price would come if nobody could pay them–perhaps student debt creates itself. As tuition goes up, more students must take on expensive debt, only so tuition can rise once again. Were such aid unavailable, tuition might not go up in the first place, and students and taxpayers would not be on the hook for billions.
Nevertheless, a college degree is often worth borrowing for. Dr. Greg Hamann, president of LBCC, believes, depending on what educational and career path one is pursuing, it can be worth borrowing for. He explains “done wisely, debt is just using other people’s money to do something that you want to do…If done right, you buy other people’s wealth to get something you would not otherwise have.”
What Hamann warns against is taking out debt without a plan on paying it back. He believes loans may “have a good return on investment and they might not, so the real question is what do you get in return.”
However, Hamann claims “to not pursue education beyond high school leaves you no options. It is not about whether or not you go on. It’s choosing where and how and for what purpose do you go on.” He elaborates that “you cannot afford to not go on. There are no jobs that can actually provide you with the kind of economic resources you need with just a high school education.”
