Week 12 Readings
#Templesoced
When I think of a student who is receiving financial aid….I think of the vast majority of students attending college today. If I think of my group of my group of eight or nine friends who attend different schools (public and private universities, state school, technical colleges, etc), there is not one of us who is not receiving financial aid. I don’t think any of us would be able to attend school if not for financial aid. For example my boyfriend is undocumented and can’t receive federal grants and loans like the Pell Grant, so if not for scholarships from the school itself, he would either not be going to school right now or in like $180,000 of debt. Maybe it’s because I don’t have any incredibly rich friends but I don’t know anyone who is attending college without financial aid. I would characterize my friend group as low middle class with some exceptions on either side. Even with aid, we are all in debt, financial aid has never been enough, and for those of us who are planning to attend graduate school we are inevitably going to go into more dent without the opportunity to start paying off the debt accrued in undergraduate sooner. I would say that the students in the study are pretty representative of many students who are going to college, especially where I grew up.
Like the students in the study, the consensus between my family, my friends, and their families was that the next logical step after high school was college. None of us went to a tech high school where we could start working straight after, we weren’t interested in selling our souls to the military, college was the way to “make it out.”
One piece of information that was new to me was learning about how states changed their priorities in spending which led to the big jump in college costs. Up until now, I believed that universities were just greedy and wanted to see their profit margin balloon so they could pay their Presidents $800,000 a year. I now understand that states began prioritizing their spending elsewhere besides higher education, and because of that many colleges and universities had to raise their prices in order to cover operational costs (is an $800,000 salary for one person a justifiable operational cost? Debatable but what do I know).
Another thing that was the concept of “opportunity cost” that many schools don’t calculate when administering financial aid. The opportunity cost is the idea that while students are in class studying, doing assignments, etc they are missing the opportunity to do other things. They are missing out on working full time, or even part time if their course load is too heavy, which could provide money for basic expenses or living costs. Again for me, my friends, and many students in the study, college was just the assumed next step. At least in my case, I didn’t really consider other options. I knew that having a high school diploma would count for very little and that attending college would help me increase my earning potential.
This idea of opportunity costs, however, is something I hadn’t considered. I know for many students that graduated high school with me, college wasn’t an option because of financial means but also because some wanted to start making money right away. I wonder though, what jobs those students were able to get (and with what salary) if they only had a high school diploma.
