(The Huffington Post, June 10, 2013)
College Commencement season across
America is all about achievement, dreams, hope—and debt.
The student loan crisis in America is
reaching epidemic proportions, to the tune of a trillion dollars owed by
students for the privilege of pursuing an affordable higher education.
As with most complex issues, there is
good news and bad. “Most students have manageable debt, and repay their loans—a
fact that is being lost in the current media coverage and policy conversations
on student loans,” says the National Association of Independent Colleges and
Universities (NAICU). But, suggests NAICU, student loans are part of a “growing
college affordability crisis.” A briefing by the organization cites growing
numbers of low-income students aspiring to college, cash-strapped middle-income
families, diminished public-funding support “for all sectors of higher
education” and the still-recovering economy as contributing factors to that
crisis.
As the cost of college rises annually,
so do the potential and reality of assuming greater financial debt to pay for
those costs. Often most affected are the latecomer groups to higher
education—adults and other non-traditional students, along with
first-generation college students. For them, realistic opportunity seems to be
slipping away despite the availability of need-based and merit scholarships, campus
work-study jobs and improved advising and orientation for such specialized
groups.
Even if Congress acts to preserve lower,
Stafford federal student loan interest rates (at 3.4 %), the overall loan
outlook remains troubling. During a
roundtable discussion in May convened by West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller,
the real message emerged that no viable long-term solution is at hand. Without
solutions, the situation will remain “intractable,” Sen. Rockefeller said, “an
under-the-radar problem” that “can bring a person down in life.”
A supporter of measures including public
loan forgiveness, income-based repayment and enhanced student financial
literacy, among other strategies, Sen. Rockefeller hosted a 90-minute session
in Morgantown that focused not on rates and statistics but the real human cost
of the student-loan burden. It’s not an
encouraging picture.
The consensus of the group, which
included students, college administrators and financial counselors, was that
loan debt cripples lives, not just the checkbook. Graduates delay marriage and
family, choose alternate career paths, defer establishing small businesses and,
no doubt worst of all, suffer deep emotional shame and guilt when they default,
all for “pursuing something society wants them to do in all good faith,” Sen.
Rockefeller said. “Here we are at war with ourselves, hurting our country.”
It can take a student 10 years to pay
off his or her debt, while living in sub-standard housing and delaying needed
purchases. Then he or she may confront the possibility that their spouses and
children will continue the cycle, because of their own student loan debt, of putting
life on hold to make the monthly payments that never seem to go away.
No one is suggesting that students
should not seek education, or should dodge their repayment obligations that
come with loans. For its part, NAICU says it supports solutions “that don’t
diminish the quality of education.” But the group in Morgantown agreed with me
that the whole process of student loan application and management should be
more user-friendly, along with greater outreach by campuses to teach families
what the impact will be once their students cross the graduation stage. As
former West Virginia University President David Hardesty put it so well, “the
message should be that you go through college,
not (just) to college….” The process of managing your education doesn’t end
with Commencement. You need to pay off your loans on the other end.
I am confident that colleges and
universities, their professional associations and parent councils, the
government, the financial community and, most of all, our constituent students
and their families will continue proactive, productive discussion and advance
realistic solutions not only on the loan situation but the overall
higher-education affordability crisis. We need to do something now—to focus, as
President Hardesty said, on those dimensions of the problem that can be solved.
That seems to be the best way to begin
to ensure that society is not crippled in a larger sense by a debt that now cripples
so many, so silently, at home.
# # # #
Dr.
Scott D. Miller is president of Bethany College and M.M. Cochran Professor of
Leadership Studies. Now in his 22nd year as a college president, he serves as a
consultant to college presidents and boards.
