Is College Really Worth the Money The
Real World Este Griffith had it all figured out. When she
graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in April 2001, she had her sights
set on one thing: working for a labor union. The real world had
other ideas. Griffith left school with not only a degree, but a boatload of
debt. She owed $15.000 in student loans and had racked up $4,000 in credit card
debt for books, groceries and other expenses. No labor union job could pay
enough to bail her out. So Griffith went to work instead for a
Washington, D.C. firm that specializes in economic development. Problem solved
Nope. At age 24, she takes home about $1,800 a month, $1,200 of which disappears
to pay her rent. Add another $180 a month to retire her student loans and $300 a
month to whittle down her credit card balance. "You do the math," she
says. Griffith has practically no money to live on. She
brown-bags (自带午餐) her lunch and bikes to work. Above all, she fears she’ll never
own a house or be able to retire. It’s not that she regrets getting her degree.
"But they don’t tell you that the trade-off is the next ten years of your
income," she says. That’s precisely the deal being made by more
and more college students. They’re mortgaging their futures to meet soaring
tuition costs and other college expenses. Like Griffith, they’re facing a
one-two punch at graduation: hefty (沉重的) student loans and smothering credit
card debt—not to mention a job market that, for now anyway, is dismal.
"We axe forcing our children to make a choice between two evils," says
Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law professor and expert on bankruptcy. "Skip
college and face a life of diminished opportunity, or go to college and face a
life shackled (束缚) by debt." Tuition Hikes For some
time, colleges have insisted their steep tuition hikes are needed to pay for
cutting-edge technologies, faculty and administration salaries, and rising
health care costs. Now there’s a new culprit (犯人): shrinking state support.
Caught in a severe budget crunch, many states have sharply sealed back their
funding for higher education. Someone had to make up for those
lost dollars. And you can guess who—especially if you live in Massachusetts,
which last year hiked its tuition and fees by 24 percent, after funding dropped
by 3 percent, or in Missouri, where appropriations (拨款) fell by 10 percent, but
tuition rose at double that rate. About one-third of the states, in fact, have
increased tuition and fees by more than 10 percent. One of those
states is California, and Janet Burrell’s family is feeling the pain. A
bookkeeper in Torrance, Burrell has a daughter at the University of California
at Davis. Meanwhile, her sons attend two-year colleges because Burrell can’t
afford to have all of them in four-year schools at once.
Meanwhile, even with tuition hikes, California’s community colleges are so
strapped for cash they dropped thousands of classes last spring. The result:
54,000 fewer students. Collapsing Investments Many
families thought they had a surefire plan: even if tuition kept skyrocketing,
they had invested enough money along the way to meet the costs. Then a funny
thing happened on the way to Wall Street. Those investments collapsed with the
stuck market. Among the losers last year: the wildly popular "529" plans—federal
tax-exempt college savings plans offered by individual states, which have
attracted billions from families around the country. "We hear from many parents
that what they had set aside declined in value so much that they now don’t have
enough to see their students through," says Penn State financial aid director
Anna Griswold, who witnessed a 10 percent increase in loan applications last
year. Even with a market that may be slowly recovering, it will take time,
perhaps several years, for people to recoup (补偿) their losses.
Nadine Sayegh is among those who didn’t have the luxury of waiting for her
college nest egg to grow back. Her father had invested money toward her tuition,
but a large chunk of it vanished when stocks went south. Nadine was then only
partway through college. By graduation, she had taken out at least $10,000 in
loans, and her mother had borrowed even more on her behalf. Now 22, Nadine is
attending law school, having signed for yet more loans to pay for that. "There
wasn’t any way to do it differently," she says, "and I’m not happy about it.
I’ve sat down and calculated how long it will take me to pay off everything.
I’ll be 35 years old." That’s if she’s very lucky: Nadine based her calculation
on landing a job right out of law school that will pay her at least $120,000 a
year. Dependent on Loans and Credit Cards The American
Council on Education has its own calculation that shows how students are more
and more dependent on loans. In just five years, from 1995 to 2000, the median
loan debt at public institutions rose from $10,342 to $15,375. Most of this
comes from federal loans, which Congress made more tempting in 1992 by expanding
eligibility (home equity no longer counts against your assets) and raising loan
limits (a dependent undergraduate can now borrow up to $23,000 from the federal
government). But students aren’t stopping there. The College
Board estimates that they also borrowed $4.5 billion from private lenders in the
2000～2001 academic year, up from $1.5 billion just five years earlier.
For lots of students, the worst of it isn’t even the weight of those
direct student loans. It’s what they rack up on all those plastic cards in their
wallets. As of two years ago, according to a study by lender Nellie Mae, more
than eight out of ten undergrads had their own credit cards, with the typical
student carrying four. That’s no big surprise, given the in-your-face marketing
by credit card companies, which set up tables on campus to entice (诱惑) students
to sign up. Some colleges ban or restrict this hawking, but others give it a
boost. You know those credit cards emblazoned with a school’s picture or its
logo For sanctioning such a card—a must-have for some students—a college
department or association gets payments from the issuer. Meanwhile, from
freshman year to graduation, according to the Nellie Mae study, students triple
the number of credit cards they own and double their debt on them. As of 2001,
they were in the hole an average $2,327. A Wise Choice
One day, Moyer sat down with his mother, Janne O’Donnell, to talk about
his goal of going to law school. Don’t count on it, O’Donnell told him. She
couldn’t afford the cost and Moyer doubted he could get a loan, given how much
he owed already. "He said he felt like a failure," O’Donnell recalls. "He didn’t
know how he had gotten into such a mess." A week later, the
22-year-old hanged himself in his bedroom, where his mother found him. O’Donnell
is convinced the money pressures caused his suicide. "Sean tried to pay his
debts off," she says. "And he couldn’t take it." To be sure,
suicides are exceedingly rare. But despair is common, and it sometimes leads
students to rethink whether college was Worth it. In fact, there are quite a few
jobs that don’t require a college degree, yet pay fairly well. On average,
though, college graduates can expect to earn 80 percent more than those with
only a high school diploma. Also, all but two of the 50 highest paying jobs (the
exceptions being air traffic controllers and nuclear power reactor operators)
require a four-year college degree. So foregoing a college education is often
not a wise choice. Merit Mikhail, who graduated last June from
the University of California, Riverside, is glad she borrowed to get through
school. But she left Riverside owing $20,000 in student loans and another $7,000
in credit card debt. Now in law school, Merit hopes to become a public-interest
attorney, yet she may have to postpone that goal, which bothers her. To handle
her debt, she’ll probably need to start with a more lucrative (有利的) legal
job. Like so many other students, Mikhail took out her loans on
a kind of blind faith that she could deal with the consequences. "You say to
yourself. ’I have to go into debt to make it work, and whatever it takes later.
I’ll manage.’" Later has now arrived, and Mikhail is finding out the true cost
of her college degree. Merit will have to start with a more lucrative legal job instead of her favorite position—a public-interest attorney because she has to ______.