College Admission Help

College Counselor Advise: Recession is the right time to put college in reach
BY NICOLAUS MILLS
Newsday.com
Opinion
This month, colleges across the country have been hosting the high school seniors they've admitted for next fall. The students visit classes, talk with faculty and check out the dorms. It's the last stage in an admission process that's been going since September or earlier, and it ought to be a happy time for the admitted students, who traditionally have until May 1 to make their final decisions on what college they'll attend.

But this year, with the economy the way it is, there's a lot of worry for the class of 2013 and their parents. At the college where I teach, we've started an "Angel Fund" to meet what we are sure will be greater financial need among both new and old students - and even with this fund, we're still fearful that the shaky economy may cause parents who'd like to send their sons and daughters to us to choose a less expensive school or one nearer to home.

We're not alone. Most college and university endowments are down between 20 and 30 percent, and school administrators are taking measures they wouldn't have considered years ago.

Harvard, for example, has frozen salaries and slowed expansion. At my school, our president has voluntarily taken a 10 percent cut in her salary, and the faculty have voted to take their sabbatical leaves a year later than normal.

These are important steps. But I also hope Congress and the Obama administration will now become more involved in higher education.

They have already increased Pell Grants, which go to low-income students, to $5,350 in 2009. And federal spending on higher education, helped by the use of stimulus money, will reach $17.5 billion this year.

But it would be a shame if Washington limited its response to the crisis in higher education just to throwing more money at it. It needs a more thorough rethinking.

Higher education has been going in the wrong financial direction for a number of years. Between 1980 and 1999, tuition at private, four-year institutions rose 136 percent; at public, four-year institutions, by 114 percent. Nationwide, the average college senior graduates with student-loan debt nearing $20,000.

Structural, not just incremental, change is needed now, and the most important step the government can take is to make it possible for students who take out loans for college to pay them back in a way that won't burden them for the rest of their lives.

The most practical solution to this problem was recently proposed by professors Theda Skocpol of Harvard and Suzanne Mettler of Cornell. Their plan would make federally guaranteed loans the key to all student borrowing for college. In the system they envision, the loans would be repaid through annual tax returns, and repayment rates would be set at a fixed percentage of income over a period of years after college.

That means that students who went into lucrative professions would have no trouble paying back the amount of money they borrowed (and the government would even make a small profit on them), while students who chose to be teachers or social workers could do so without fearing they couldn't meet their loan payments.

For the country, the result would be a win-win. More students from poor and middle-class would be able to enter the "helping" professions, and there would be an overall tax benefit to the government as well, since the lifetime incomes of college grads average nearly $300,000 more than those of high school graduates over a 40-year career.

Given the demands that the current recession have placed on the government, it's understandable that higher education reform hasn't dominated the headlines.

But we shouldn't feel that we have to wait for our current recession to end in order to change how we help students pay for college. History reminds us that our two greatest federal aid programs in higher education occurred in the midst of crises. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, establishing land-grant colleges in 1862 while the Civil War was raging, and President Franklin Roosevelt signed the GI Bill into law in 1944, during World War II.

These are precedents we should build on. A recession is exactly the right time to make college more affordable and accessible.

Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is the author of "Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America's Coming of Age as a Superpower."

Copyright © 2009, Newsday Inc.


College Counselor Advise: Recession is the right time to put college in reach