Make college affordable to improve lives and build national prosperity
By Zakiya Smith
Most of us know a good thing when we see it. That’s true for higher education, which despite some differences of opinion remains highly regarded as a gateway to job and life success. Now if we could just figure out a better way to pay for it.
I come at this as a former student teacher just outside of Nashville, whose grandmother attended college in the 1950s in South Carolina before schools there were integrated. I know both the transformative power of higher education and the pains that come from a lack of equity within the system for students of color and low-income students. So, I work today with Lumina Foundation to close gaps by race and income and to consider how we might make college more affordable and equitable for all students.
When talking to students, would-be students and their families directly, their concerns about college are clear — they think it’s important, but they just don’t know how they will pay for it. Today’s students have responsibilities and commitments that extend far beyond the classroom. More than one-third attend part time, and nearly 20 percent are holding down full-time jobs as they attend college.
Students of color in particular are more likely to be balancing work and the responsibilities of parenting with going to college, as over 40 percent of black and Native American students are also parents. And contrary to popular imagination, students today actually must work far more than past generations did in order to pay for college. So these affordability concerns aren’t just in their heads: The challenge of paying for college today is greater than in the past.
Beyond direct expenses of tuition and fees, students today must also face the challenge of paying their non-tuition costs — books, supplies, food, and rent. These expenses can often be more than the cost of tuition and fees alone, making a rigid fixation on tuition an inadequate solution for most students.
And yet as we think about how to address this concern, we must recognize that affordability means different things to different people — what’s a bargain to one person may feel like an unattainable luxury to another. That’s why we can’t focus only on the overarching price, or even the average net price, because it alone does not capture what is reasonable for families at different income levels. For this reason, it is important to frame affordability in terms that are tailored to individual and family needs, yet are transparent enough for most people to understand.
To this end Lumina Foundation, the nation’s largest private foundation focused specifically on increasing students’ access to and success in postsecondary education, has developed a concept called the affordability benchmark. It’s based on some key principles:
- Those with the capacity to save should be encouraged to do so with clear guidelines that can be broken down into monthly amounts.
- Students without the capacity to save for college shouldn’t be expected to do so.
- No student should have to work so much to pay for college that it impacts their ability to be successful in school.
Two connected recommendations could make this a reality. First, we support a federal-state partnership for affordability, quality, and completion. A benchmark approach, or any other type of affordability guarantee, would require a new type of partnership between the federal and state government in which colleges also commit to lower prices and better outcomes for students over time.
States should be encouraged to invest in postsecondary education to better leverage federal resources toward affordability and value. And, because affordability can’t really be separated from value, it would require being more vigilant about quality, both to root out fraudulent practices and ensure credentials are meaningful.
We should also strengthen and preserve the Pell grant. Pell is the foundation of federal student aid, the bedrock on which the federal commitment to students is based. Unfortunately, the grant itself has not kept up with the rising price of education.
We hope that policymakers will consider ways to strengthen the Pell grant so that it remains available for future generations, and to encourage implementation of early awareness and information campaigns to ensure would-be students are aware of its availability.
Zakiya Smith is a strategy director in Washington, D.C., for Lumina Foundation. This is adapted from her testimony before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, on the topic: Reauthorizing the Higher Education Act: Improving College Affordability.
