Rob Horowitz: Making College Affordable Must Be High Priority

In today’s increasingly competitive global economy, ensuring broad opportunities for people to attend college and get other forms of post-secondary training regardless of their family’s income is a key to upgrading the skill level of the American workforce—a must if we are to maintain American economic strength. It is also essential to realizing the promise inherent in the American Dream—-that with hard work and a focus on your goals one can build a middle class life for yourself and your family and live better than your parents. Yet, as college is now the gateway to the middle class, it is becoming increasingly unaffordable, causing too many talented young people to either forego it, drop-out or become weighed down with excessive debt just as they are starting out.

 

A record one-in-five American households hold student loan debt, a percentage that has more than doubled over the past twenty years, according to an analysis of newly available government data by the Pew Research Center. Even more troubling, 40 %of households led by someone under the age of 35 have student loan debt. The average amount of debt is close to $27,000 and one-in-ten owe more than $61,000.

 

The total level of student loan debt has reached $1 trillion, exceeding credit card debt. Not surprisingly, the default rate is high and rising—which promises to be a drag on the economy, wrecking potential new home buyers’ credit ratings and creating a new source of potentially exploding government debt

 

The rise in student loan debt is a result of rapid and unsustainable increases in the costs of college. Even our nation’s public colleges have grown increasingly unaffordable as financially squeezed states are providing much less funding and cost-effective innovations such as stepped-up distance learning have yet to be widely implemented. For example, in Rhode Island, state funding for URI on a per-student basis has been cut nearly in half over the past ten years, according to a study released over the weekend by the National Science Board.

 

There are some promising developments including the Obama Administration's emphasis on the importance of Community Colleges, success in holding down the interest rates on student loans, and proposals advanced to leverage the use of federal aid to bring about more cost-effectiveness.

 

But broader more systematic reform is required. Colleges and universities must institute broad ranging efficiencies seizing on the true potential of new technology in order to hold down costs. A more sensible financial aid structure that does not weigh down a new generation with excessive debt must be put in place. And the federal government and state governments must restore higher education--an essential investment in our future--to a top funding priority, while at the same time tying funding to the effective implementation of innovations designed to produce cost-savings.

 

Otherwise, decisions such as the one by the RI Board of Governor’s finance committee last week to not hike tuition next year at Rhode Island state colleges and universities will be more of a hopeful wish than a policy than can be implemented.

 

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.