David Hoppe

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:: The assault on college education

Do they really want you to go?

By David Hoppe

It's May, and across the country another class of college seniors is getting ready to graduate. Americans love the idea of college graduation. Traditionally in this country, a college education has represented the great steppingstone to a better way of life. "To get a good job," we used to say, "get a good education." A good education meant getting a college degree.

A lot of Americans got the message. Today, 30 percent of the population is college-educated, whereas in the 1960s that number was only 10 percent. By and large this has been a good thing for the people with college degrees. Their earning power is substantially better than those who have only been to high school. Not only that, the college educated are more likely to volunteer and to vote.

Given these positive effects, it has been tempting for many of us to cling to the old rhetoric about education and jobs. We like to tell ourselves that one leads to the other, and that making college available to as many people as possible is the American Way .

But students and their parents have had to deal with a number of detours on the way to graduation day. To begin with, the cost of a college education has sky-rocketed since the 1960s. According to the Smart Student Guide to Financial Aid, the average tuition inflation rate during any 17-year period from 1958 to 2001 was between six and nine percent, ranging from 1.2 to 2.1 times general inflation. On average, tuition tends to increase about eight percent per year, which means that the cost of college has doubled every nine years. A baby born today will face college costs that are three times current rates.

Recent initiatives pushed by the Republican-controlled congress have made the cost of a college education even more onerous for most people. Last February, Republicans cut nearly $12 billion to student assistance programs. In the latest budget before Congress, not only have Republican legislators pushed to extend tax cuts for the wealthiest families, they have also proposed cutting tax deductions for college tuition.

People, nevertheless, have found ways to pay for the increasing costs of college. Typically, this has meant going into debt. Given the eventual pay-offs associated with getting a college degree, shouldering debt has been justified by many as making a necessary investment. Today a typical student borrower graduates with $17,500 in loan debt. According to a new book by Anya Kamenetz, Generation Debt , nearly a quarter of college students are using credit cards to pay some of their tuition costs.

Paying off that debt, especially with today's increasing interest rates, could prove even more difficult than expected in today's labor market. That 20 percent increase in college grads since the 1960s has created what looks like a surplus of educated workers. There's a greater supply of educated people, in other words, than demand. While the number of jobs that require a bachelor's degree has been growing, the number of graduates has been growing at an even faster rate. Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard notes, "The average college graduate is doing very well. But on the margin, college graduates appear to be more vulnerable than in the past."

Since 2000, the Labor Department has been comparing the demand for jobs against the supply available. In the first 41 months of their survey, they found there were 2.6 job seekers for every job opening. And most of those jobs weren't exactly what you'd call college material. From the spring of 2003 to the spring of 2004, more than 55 percent of the hiring paid wages of $13.25 per hour or less.

The 2006 Economic Report of the President reveals that real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than five percent between 2000 and 2004.

One consequence of this situation is that the undergraduate degree, as costly as it is, is becoming more way station than destination. Today's B.A. begins to look like the equivalent of a high school diploma in the early 1960s. Many students are finding that the only way to get an educational edge is to add a graduate degree, which means more money and more debt - but delays having to face the reality of a labor market with diminished options.

Connect all these dots and it's hard not to conclude that our conventional wisdom about the economic benefits of a college education has failed to keep up with what is often called "the reality on the ground." When you consider the outrageously escalating costs, the cuts to government oversight and financial supports, and the increasingly dubious jobs market, a message begins to emerge: Unless we fight for it, the era of college for anyone educationally qualified to go may be ending.

Rep. George Miller of California and Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois have introduced what they call the Reverse the Raid on Student Aid Act of 2006. This would cut interest rates on student loans in half. While it doesn't begin to address the larger issues affecting higher education, it's a decent start. Tell your elected representatives to support it. Make the cost of college an election issue this fall.