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A couple of years ago, I was brainstorming with a few editorial board members about a possible Change article: Wouldn't it be a good idea, we thought, to send someone to visit his or her college and report on the changes there?
Several articles in this issue have prompted me to make that journey myself, at least in my imagination: I've been musing about my college days and how they compare to those of the students written about in this issue. Perhaps some readers of this magazine will recognize themselves in my description.
Then
I grew up in Los Angeles, the third daughter of what I have come to realize was a poor family. I went through the public school system there, and then went on to UCLA, where my sisters had gone to college, and from there to Stanford for my first year of the graduate education that I finished up at the University of Virginia.
My grammar school was no great shakes—my mother used to tell the story of my 6th-grade teacher handing her one of my language papers with the comment, “She done real good on this one!” But high school—white, largely middle class, and stable—prepared me well for college, since the school system in the San Fernando Valley was remarkably functional.
My parents were under serious financial strain at the time. But student fees (not tuition—then, the state paid all the direct costs of education) were, I believe, $54 per semester that year, so they managed just fine. And I was ensured entrance, given my high-school performance. The other students at UCLA were much like me: same class, same color, same educational background.
My first year of graduate study at Stanford was completely paid for (tuition, room and board) by my job as a resident advisor, and when my new husband and I moved to Virginia, we were able to manage my doctoral-program tuition on his $10,000 salary as an assistant professor.
In short, the system worked for me.
Granted, it did so in part because I had advantages that were invisible to me at the time: lots of conversation and reading in the family, college-educated and accomplished women elders, my race and ethnicity, and so on. I could be poor and still succeed without undue strain.
Now
The school system that worked so well for me seems to have become dysfunctional. A former teacher tells me that students in his classes come and go as their parents move in and out of jobs, making it close to impossible to develop the class's understanding of algebra over the course of a semester. The schools still haven't figured out how to adapt to these changing realities of students' lives. And the high school that served me so well has become newsworthy for the 1993 rival-gang shootout during a midmorning snack break.
This year, for the first time the UC system is getting more of its income from fees than from the state. The University of California's average educational and student-services fees for 2010–11 were $10,302. When you add other expenses such as books, health insurance, housing, and transportation, the total comes to almost $30,000 a year.
But even so, native students are less frequently getting to attend the UC campus of their choice. In 2009, Berkeley made plans to enroll about 15 percent fewer Californians, while at the same time it hoped to roughly double the proportion (from about 12 percent to 23 percent) of its student body coming from out of state in large part, because of the higher fees they pay (Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/article/As-Berkeley-Enrolls-More-Ou/49049/). With the California State University system “serving about 10,000 fewer students than it did last year” and “the California Community College system … as many as 400,000 fewer students,” as William Tierney points out in his article here, the for-profit sector—already serving larger proportions of minority, first-generation, and lower-income students than most non-profit institutions—is there to absorb the overflow, but at even higher fee levels.
All of this makes it increasingly difficult for students to manage. They live at home, work, and stop out. The strain shows in their lower levels of emotional health (as measured by the most recent HERI survey) and in their abuse of alcohol and drugs, a problem addressed by David Anderson in this issue.
Some join the Armed Forces—as the promising grandson of an old friend of mine just did—in hopes of getting advanced training and education on a parallel track and eventually benefitting from the GI Bill. Ironically, if he returns to California for his college education, he's out of luck—because, as the Irascible Professor points out (http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-06-18-09.htm), California charges “fees” rather than tuition and the GI Bill pays only up to the highest amount of tuition charged by a public college or university in the state.
Even middle-class students have parents who, having taken them out of failing public school systems (from which poorer children cannot escape), struggle to come up with enough money to pay for that schooling plus college, often using their own increasingly threatened retirement savings to fund the package (while paying off their own student loans), but falling further and further behind as college costs rise.
The current system does have one significant advantage over the old one: It is more inclusive. I remember a black colleague's saying that when he was young, the kids in his community watched the hoards of white college students stream through on their way to City College, never thinking for a moment that they too might go there. The commitment to Hispanic students demonstrated by Juliet García in her article in this issue was little in evidence when I went to college—indeed, when I arrived as a graduate student at the University of Virginia's College of Arts and Sciences, there were no undergraduate women allowed: they got to matriculate at the separate-but-equal Mary Washington College. And I doubt that the idea of offering a college education to prisoners, as the Bard Prison Initiative that Ellen Lagemann describes here does, occurred to anyone.
But many of those students have been ill-served by the educational system thus far. For that and financial reasons they disproportionately end up in two-year institutions, where their chances of graduating have, so far at least, been vanishingly small (although six national community-college organizations have made a pledge to boost student completion rates by 50 percent during the next decade). Or—as mentioned—they land in the for-profit sector, whose success rates are also not good.
Those lower-income students who do make it to a four-year nonprofit college are less likely than their wealthier peers to receive financial help from the institutions they enroll in, as pointed out by Will Doyle in an earlier Playing the Numbers feature on the proportion of their financial assistance institutions allot to merit aid (November/December 2009). Jeffrey Groen's article on states' use of merit aid only reinforces the conclusion that “although merit-aid programs increase the share of high school graduates who go to college, most of the scholarship money is spent on students who would have attended college anyway.” Mark Kantrowitz has found as well that “Caucasian students receive more than three-quarters (76%) of all institutional merit-based scholarship and grant funding, even though they represent less than two-thirds (62%) of the student population” (http://www.finaid.org/scholarships/20110902racescholarships.pdf).
I wonder if the escalating price of college serves the same purpose that residential segregation has—invisibly screening out those who most need the boost into the middle class that a good education can provide. No one wants it that way, I trust. But I do wonder why the public is less and less willing to fund such essential services as education. It may be that students these days look increasingly unlike the children or grandchildren of the people in power; it may be that there are just too many students to support now; it may be that competing demands have become too urgent (my parents would have lost their home if it hadn't been for Proposition 13, which decimated public education in California).
But when I think of how it was for me then compared to how it is for students now, my reaction is, selfishly, “Whew!” And I look at the efforts of people like Juliet Garcia, Ellen Lagemann, and their colleagues with gratitude that they're working so valiantly to right the balance. Gary Rhoades is right when he says, in his article on faculty unionism in this issue, that it will take all the cooperation we can muster to solve the problems that confront us now.
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