The Higher Cost of Higher Education

At a time when classes of high school students are accepting their diplomas, the effect of the recession on the college experience becomes even more noticeable. Reed College recently allowed reporters inside their admissions offices during the selection process for the class of 2013, as well as in their budgetary meetings. The resulting report, “College in Need Closes a Door to Needy Students”, by Jonathan D. Glater at the New York Times, shows a college in risk of losing its character to penny-pinching. After forming a tentative accepted class, Reed was forced to chop over 100 needy students from that list and “substitute [with] those who could pay full freight”. And this “full freight” just got a little heavier. The school has also decided to raise tuition prices to nearly $50,000. Already a small, expensive private school with just 1,300 undergraduates, Reed may find its incoming class of 2013 a little less diverse.

In addition, Needham-based Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering has followed the trend and raised tuition. No longer a free endowment-funded ride, the school will now cost students, starting with the class of 2014, roughly $18,000 annually. You may be less willing to commiserate with students who had previously enjoyed the best financial gift of their lives, but consider the fact that by instituting tuition, Olin abandoned any chance at truly blind application readings. The admission process just became slightly less objective, less merit or character-based. Olin has become a business, like almost every other institution of higher education in the U.S.

So is this the price prospective college students will pay for ponzi schemes, a poorly regulated mortgage market, and the recession in general? More students of my generation will be confined to the same socio-economic situation of their parents. In a time when a graduate degree is the new B.A., and an undergraduate degree is necessary to get any job, students who cannot afford a challenging intellectual experience will find themselves settling. In effect, we, as current students, are all settling. Some for less diverse college experiences, some for less intellectual growth, and some for the work world instead of academia.

For those students who hope that “settling” will soon be less common, there is some hope – as cliché as that word is in reference to the Obama administration. In April, President Obama announced his intention to create the Direct Loan Program. Direct Loan (DL) will take the place of the 34 year old Federal Family Education Loans Program. DL will eliminate middlemen and private lenders and supposedly find $94 billion being wasted in a bureaucratic lending system. I hope that the impressiveness of that sum (as small as it may be compared to some other bailouts and restructurings), does in fact stimulate a change in the upward spiral of tuition prices and relieve some of the stress of the average $22,000 in debt taken on as soon as you accept your diploma. But even more than that, I look forward to a return to less compromised standards at colleges and universities.