I’m not saving for college. I’ll stand up and admit it. My husband and I are not socking away every red cent so my newly born son can enter an Ivy League school in the fall of 2028. First, let’s do the math. Harvard will cost $50,274 this fall. Why Harvard? Because he’ll be the best and the brightest. Right? He certainly can’t attend my alma mater. Plus it’s the only way to get an appointment in a Democratic administration these days – should he choose that path. But, I digress. College is essentially unaffordable, and I don’t want to spend my life or earnings trying to reach an unattainable goal.
According to the White House statistics, from Joe Biden’s long forgotten Middle Class Task Force,
The last three decades have
generally been a period of weak
income growth for typical
American families, as the
concentration of wealth at the
top of the income scale has
dramatically increased and
hardworking middle-class
families have not shared in
economic growth. During that
same period of time, from 1979
to 2007, the median income of
American families with
children grew just 10 percent,
from $53,760 to $59,190. This
10 percent growth in the
median family income since
1979 represents a 0.34 percent
annual growth rate. Over that
same span of time, the average
published cost of college tuition
and fees has grown at an
annual rate of 3.15 percent for
private four-year colleges and
an annual rate of 3.56 percent
for public four-year
institutions, or about ten times
as fast as real median incomes
for families with children.
And yet despite (or because of?) these numbers, everyone from Joe Biden on down suggests you save for college. Unless a miracle befalls this country – most parents could never save enough. Even Joe Biden sees that.
And Then There Is Grad School
For kicks, I popped on over to the College Board’s web-based cost projector. Using their very conservative calculator – the cost of that Harvard education in 17 years? A mere $141,000 a year – for a total cost of that college education coming in at just under a cool half million dollars. This calculator doesn’t even factor in graduate school, which still others insist is a”must.” But the folks at the College Board claim, as does every website, that advocates parents and children sacrifice all they can for college, that few pay the sticker price of college. And with scholarships, loans, and grants, it’s the right thing to do. (You see how they subtlety slip “loans” into the same sentence as gift sources?) Many schools and banks and other interested parties tout statistics that show on average, college graduates earn more than those with a high school diploma. The higher earnings, they promise make any and all sacrifice worthwhile.
None of these, however, talks about the true cost of college. And the flaws inherent in these statistics are now coming to light.
First there are the years of forgoing earnings. Second are the interest payments on the aforementioned loans that are often oh-so-casually slipped into the financial aid conversation. Whether those payments are made in five years, or twenty-five years, it’s money that pays for nothing other than the use of money to pay for an education, for which the benefits may be ephemeral. Several newspapers and bloggers have done the numbers. In bald terms, the return on investment ranges somewhere between sixty-five thousand dollars and zero – and that’s over a lifetime.
Middle Class Is the Pinnacle?
Having scared my son’s grandparents to death with my no-savings pronouncement, I received an email just this week from my mother (a college professor) with an attached article that proclaimed: without a college education, our prospective high-skilled jobs are surely going to ship abroad. Georgetown University’s Center on Education in the Workforce (where are those unbiased opinions?) raised the flag of alarm this month, stating that by 2018 the number of jobs requiring a post-secondary education will far outstrip the number of college graduates – by some three million. Like fitting cogs in a wheel, the report proposes – if all of these young Americans just get the “right” education, then they just might get a lifetime of middle-class wages. And as they boldface and italicize, it may be the only access to middle-class earnings.
I can’t even imagine the loans (or monthly payments) required to finance a half million- dollar education. But I don’t want my child, as part of the indentured educated class, handcuffed to a job that purports to pay a lifetime of middle-class wages. As Americans, already we can’t afford our cars, so we finance them. We can’t afford our overpriced metropolitan homes, so we finance them. Now our educations, needed, of course, to finance our homes and our cars and our credit cards, are financed as well. It may be cheaper to opt out of the whole rat race.
I am not against a good liberal arts education, per se. I (mostly) enjoyed my years in college, and think I’m better for it. I’ve met plenty of people who didn’t go to college, who I thought could have benefitted from several years of personal and intellectual growth. But with a fifty thousand dollar price tag? A person can read, say a literary masterpiece anywhere, and I’m not sure the intellectual colloquy that follows is worth the money.
Perhaps all that “intellectual” discussion goes out the window, especially as some colleges move toward more business oriented degrees that teach students nothing more than how to become a cog in the wheel of an unsustainable consumer economy. Or teach students how to dream up complex mathematical formulae to create complex investments that can bring down the stock market and an entire financial system in one fell swoop. Neither the individual, nor society benefits from this kind of ‘education.’
But, many ask, when I lay out a cost/benefit analysis to them: What other choice do we, as parents, have? I don’t know, but I have eighteen years to figure it out.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
