The soaring cost of a college education and skyrocketing student debt threaten our nation’s future.
The danger was made clear again this Sunday in a USA Today report in the Sun-Times. It revealed that while Hispanics in the United States — many of them immigrants — are attending college more than ever, they are struggling mightily to stay in school and actually earn a degree. The cost is just too high.
At a time when millions of Americans worry about the possible negative impact of immigration, our nation is foolish to allow that to continue. An affordable education, including higher education, offers the most direct path upward for all Americans, and most especially for immigrants.
Yet here we are.
Year after year, lawmakers around the country, including in Illinois, have trimmed support for higher education while saying those who benefit from college ought to pay for an increasingly larger share of the costs. Young people are lugging around student loans the size of home mortgages.
The USA Today report detailed how Latino students struggle to complete their educations while juggling jobs, transportation and classes. Although Latinos are one of only two demographic groups that have gone to college in larger numbers since 2017, many find it difficult to come up with the money to complete a degree.
Only about 22% of Latinos over age 25 have earned an associate’s degree or higher, compared with 40% of the overall population.
College kids — and would-be college kids — are paying the price, but so are the rest of us. The ripple effect of the student loan crisis threatens to set the entire national economy on edge.
The aggregate amount of student loan debt has risen to $1.6 trillion, according to a report last week by Moody’s Investors Service, and that enormous debt is prohibiting young people from moving on to the next stages of their lives. They are forced to wait longer to form households. They must put off buying homes, cars and furniture.
“The student loan crisis is going to gobble us up if we don’t do something radical,” U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., told us on Monday.
The leading candidates for the Democratic nomination for president have proposed all kinds of solutions, from the mild to the ambitious. They have called for forgiving student loans, expanding Pell Grants, providing free tuition, spending more on workforce training and increasing spending on historically black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions.
An excellent reform, proposed by Krishnamoorthi, is the College Transparency Act, which would overturn a prohibition on the federal government collecting and publishing national student outcome data by academic major and college. Such data, presented online in a clear and accessible way, would allow college-bound Americans to do a little comparative shopping.
Somebody in the Chicago area looking to earn a bachelor’s degree in accounting, for example, would be able to compare the costs and outcomes — degrees and good jobs obtained — of accounting programs at colleges and universities throughout the region. The data would include the average time to employment and the average debt, broken down into such categories as veterans, the disabled, gender and ethnicity.
“You may think, ‘I have to go to this private institution down the street,’ whereas the College of DuPage or University of Illinois might offer the same degree with the same outcomes at a much lower price,” Krishnamoorthi said. “And so your family is finally going to be able to have the tools to make a return-on-investment decision.
“And what that will do is that will force the private institution to rethink, OK, we had better either increase our outcomes or lower our prices.”
Congress also should insist that federal aid go directly to academics and not administrative costs, which are on the rise, athletic facilities or posh cafeterias and dorms.
Reforms to cut costs should be coupled with greater government investment in higher education, paring back those ever-higher tuition costs that have forced students to borrow backbreaking amounts of money. Two-thirds of the graduates from public and private nonprofit colleges in 2018 had taken on student loan debt, owing an average of $29,200, according to a Sept. 19 report by the Institute for College Access & Success.
College was once much more affordable, as aging baby boomers know well. The boomers owe it to the next generation — and to our nation’s future — to make college affordable again.
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