New Book: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream

Posted by University Of Chicago Press on September 19, 2016

Upcoming Book to Highlight Affordability Barriers
[from National College Access Network newsletter]

Sara Goldrick-Rab, professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University, and founder of the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, recently completed a telling project that followed 3,000 low-income students for six years. The students all started college full-time at age 18 in Wisconsin in 2008. Her findings will be released fully in a forthcoming book, but she previewed the overall themes in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education commentary piece. The findings she shares, and hopefully the upcoming book, will give research support to what NCAN members experience with their students every day: the barriers to an affordable, high-quality education are growing and government policies are woefully outdated in their ability to address them.

Goldrick-Rab highlighted five findings from her research in the Chronicle:

1. The way the federal government measures students’ financial need is misleading and even flat-out wrong. It overstates a family’s ability to pay for college by ignoring debt and the hardships that go with it, and grossly understates the actual costs of attending college.
2. Although colleges often expect families to financially support their children while they attend college, the reverse is happening — low-income children are supporting their parents, grandparents, and even siblings, all while being unable to buy their books.
3. Against a backdrop of increasingly fancy residence halls and sushi bars in campus cafeterias, a significant fraction of students are going without sufficient food or housing.
4. Working in college is an American tradition. But 2016 is not 1975. Many students without jobs are searching for work they can’t find. Others are holding down two or even three minimum-wage jobs to try to make enough, and too many students are working the graveyard shift because it pays more, going from work straight to class without a night’s sleep.
5. Loans are supposed to let students afford college now, focus on their studies, and pay the piper later — but that’s often not how they work in reality. Loans affect students long before they come due. With prices at an all-time high, taking a loan for college has become a necessity rather than a choice. Yet the prospects of graduating from college, let alone getting a good job afterward, are uncertain.

The above five findings are unlikely to surprise any NCAN members. Students are struggling to earn their degrees in a system that no longer matches the experiences of most policymakers. Not only are students working longer hours, but they’re using those funds to support their families rather than receiving support from their families. This reality does not set students up for success. NCAN recommends that low-income students should be able to cover the cost of attendance with a Pell Grant, Stafford Loan, state aid and work study. It is clear from these early themes, that that is not the case in most states.

Read more here: http://saragoldrickrab.com/books/