Where I come from, we talked about a college education from the very start. I mention this because we started in the Latrobe Housing Projects, 1103 Abbott Court, over by the Maryland Penitentiary, where nobody had money but plenty of families had big plans.
The rent was $29 a month, and still my parents talked about college. In those 1950s postwar years, we lived on the GI Bill, which was $120 a month and helped finance the schooling my father missed when he dropped out of college to join the war. That’s what we lived on, $120 a month. You can adjust for inflation all you want, and $120 a month is still a long way from solvent.
And still, from the start, whenever my parents talked about schooling, from the year I started kindergarten, they talked about a time when I would go to something they called college.
They talked about it, because it was part of the American dream. Even for people like us, for people living in housing projects where the rent was $29 a month, college was possible. And, after college, anything was possible.
And I mention this today because that great American dream seems to be slipping away: Not just for kids coming out of housing projects, but for those coming out of whatever’s left of the nervous middle class, too. It’s this way in Maryland, and it’s this way across America. Some of it has to do with the awful economy. But some of it doesn’t.
By the time I got to the University of Maryland, in the fall of 1963, it cost less than $3,000 for an entire year. That includes tuition, room and board, books. The price wasn’t easy – but, for any family making middle class money back then, it was reachable.
And it isn’t any more.
The other day, the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education released a report saying the rising cost of college threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans.
What in the world has happened? Over the past 25 years, the report says, college tuition and fees increased about three times as much as median family incomes. And, over the past decade, as costs have risen, student borrowing has doubled – which means that young people just beginning their work lives, just beginning to buy their own homes and their own cars, and wishing to begin new families, are already saddled with big debt.
Take a few local schools. Two decades ago, a full year’s ride at the Johns Hopkins University cost about $21,000. Today, it’s $51,418. That includes $37,000 for tuition, more than $11,000 for room and board, and more than $2,200 for books.
At the University of Maryland in College Park – the main campus of the state university system, designed to bring affordable higher education to the great middle class – the cost is more than $21,000 for state residents, more than $36,000 for out-of-state students.
At Loyola College, the annual cost now tops $41,000.
It’s this way around the country. According to the new higher education report, called “Measuring Up 2008,” the net cost at a four-year public university, such as Maryland, amounts to 28 percent of the median family income – and it’s 55 percent of the income of those families among the poorest 20 percent.
For the median middle class student, the cost of a four-year private university, such as Hopkins or Loyola, is a breath-taking 76 percent of family income.
Around here, we saw huge, highly controversial cost increases in the state university system during the Robert Ehrlich administration. Gov. Martin O’Malley’s on record wanting to hold the line on college costs – but he’s fighting a national trend. And O’Malley may not get his wish. Maryland Chancellor William “Brit” Kirwan says we may see a modest increase during these economic times.
It’s a trend that’s gotten so bad that community colleges, once seen as a two-year financial refuge, now cost nearly half of the poorest families’ median income, according to the new education report.
And all of this is an act of national self-destruction.
We’re pricing our children out of a full education, which means we’re not only continuing to divide the country economically – ultimately, we’re going to create a work force that’s no longer competitive with the rest of the world, because so many of our citizens will have been priced out of a full intellectual skill set.
College has always been seen as the great American equalizer. You can come from the humblest beginnings but still make it as far as the kid who grew up in a mansion. You go where your brain takes you.
But the new report on higher education says that’s not so. Now, you can come from almost any economic background, and work hard, and get pretty good high school grades – and still be left out of the American dream.
