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That's Not Funny, Actually
Think twice before you make those student-loan jokes at graduation. The faculty member next to you might still be making payments.
By Kevin Brown
At commencement ceremonies all over the country this spring, speakers will laugh about the dining hall, parking, or some local odor that occasionally invades the campus. They will tell stories about beloved professors who are retiring or students who are graduating. And they will joke about time and money: how much time it took to complete a degree and how much money is now owed. Audiences will chuckle about students who will continue to rely on their parents for money; parents and younger siblings will laugh at the idea of the graduates’ “re-nesting” in the near future; and everyone will nod their heads in agreement when speakers comment about the students having spent the best four, five, or six years of their lives at Wherever U. Yet as a professor who still owes more than $40,000 in student-loan debt a year before I come up for tenure, I’m not laughing, and I doubt that many indebted students or parents really are, either.
For faculty, staff, and administrators, it’s easy to forget just how much debt students have to take on today. The numbers are simply astounding. According to the Web site FinAid.org, which cites the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), nearly two-thirds of students graduate with some sort of debt. The average federal student loan debt among graduating seniors in 2003–04 was $19,202. And that number does not reflect the amount of money students may have borrowed from private lenders, whose interest rates often exceed the federal rate. When loans from the PLUS (Parent Loan for Undergraduate Students) program are considered, the average cumulative debt rises to $21,814.
Tuition rates continue to climb—the College Board reported in 2006 that although tuition-rate increases have slowed, the average tuition at four-year public institutions is up 35 percent from five years ago. My students tell me they spend roughly $500 a semester on books, much more than the $150 I spent. And now even the interest rate on federal student loans has risen to 6.8 percent; the rate for PLUS loans is 8.5 percent. None of these costs seem close to stabilizing, not to mention going down, in the near future. As a result, more students must work while they are in school. The American Council on Education reported in 2006 that 78 percent of students worked in 2003–04 while they were enrolled in college, and the average time they worked was nearly thirty hours a week. It follows that they would have had less time to focus on school assignments, not to mention the extracurricular activities in which we would love to see them get involved.
A May 2005 article in USA Today stated that students fear debt from college more than terrorism. In a survey of the graduating class of 2005, 13.4 percent of respondents said they were most fearful of a terrorist attack; 32.4 percent worried most about “going deeply into debt”; and 31.2 percent feared “being unemployed.” When one owes more than $20,000 for a four-year degree, as nearly 21 percent of students do according to the USA Today article, it is understandable to be more afraid of debt or not being able to find a job than of terrorism.
Because students have to work more than they used to, they often take longer to finish their degrees (which often leads to deeper debt in the long run). According to Enrollment in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2004, a publication of the NCES, only 34.5 percent of college students who began in 1998 graduated in four years; 56.4 percent graduated in six years. The average cost of attending a public four-year institution in 2006–07 was $5,836, according to the College Board, so a student who takes two extra years to graduate can incur more than $11,000 in additional student-loan debt. A student at a private four-year college or university, where the average tuition was $22,218, could add more than $40,000 to his or her total.
Because of this debt, more students are moving back in with their parents. Fifty-seven percent of students from the 2004 graduating class planned to live with their parents after graduation, according to a 2005 USA Today article, mostly because of high real estate prices coupled with the amount of debt they had to accumulate. Oddly enough, socioeconomic background seems to have no effect, as households with incomes of $80,000 or more were more likely to have students move in with them than were households with lower incomes.
Colleges and universities work hard to try to accommodate students’ financial situations. Many institutions provide as much financial support as they can (63 percent of all undergraduates enrolled in 2003–04 received financial aid, according to the NCES). And some professors have begun to help students who work long hours by providing more flexible deadlines and simply by being understanding about their workloads. We can certainly do better in this regard, but we will not be able to fix the problem through these steps. Given the necessity of a college education today, the rising costs across our economy, and the larger numbers of students from diverse backgrounds who attend college, we may not be able to solve this problem at all. However, we can at least admit that a problem exists, and, at the bare minimum, we can stop joking about it at graduation. In the meantime, if you see someone sitting stoically through such jokes at a commencement service, it’s probably someone calculating how much their next payment is and when they’ll finally be free of such a burden.
Kevin Brown is assistant professor of English at Lee University. His e-mail address is kbrown@leeuniversity.edu.
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