If Colleges Didn't Waste Your Tuition, We Wouldn't Need New Student Loan Reform - Guardian [View all]

[WillyT]

If colleges didn't waste your tuition, we wouldn't need new student loan reform
Saddling students with unsustainable debts is only a symptom of the deeper erosion within higher education.
Michelle Chen - theguardian.com
Wednesday 11 June 2014 05.30 EDT

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The student debt crisis – currently the subject of executive orders, pending Senate legislation, protests and much boomer hand-wringing – is more accurately an education cost crisis. Tuitions have more than doubled since the early 1980s, but not because the quality of a college education has improved that much. Rather, it's because because policymakers and administrators have come to treat higher education as a commercial marketplace, rather than a public trust – and stop-gap student loan reforms like those "unveiled" by President Obama this week fail to confront this ethical dilemma underlying the debt pile.

According to University of California-Berkeley's Debt & Society project, rising higher education spending is in large part driven by factors that have little to do with the quality of instruction or academic resources: schools are pouring gobs of capital into material amenities like student lounges and sports arenas, and this spending in turn raises the cost of the debts schools incur to finance these projects. Much of this investment plays into the business of college – marketing the campus to students who foot the bill and bring in more revenue.

While private institutions become increasingly financialized, public institutions are also shifting toward a service-industry model. For the nearly three-quarters of US students enrolled in a public university or community college system, tuition more than doubled between 1990 and 2010, while state funding fell by about 25% on average, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Students and their families have made up the difference, borrowing on the hopes that their degree will pay off one day. Those hopes are now crumbling as young adults face a volatile labor market and long-term economic stagnation. After years of being reassured that a college diploma was their key to a stable future, young people find themselves in the hole before they even collect their first paycheck.

Another driver of debt is the eroding value of Pell grants, which are targeted to low-income families. The maximum grant currently covers less than one third of the total tuition, room and board costs at a typical public four-year university.

The collapse of public support for higher education has...

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More: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/11/college-tuition-waste-student-loan-reform