My TEDxPhiladelphia Talk
Talk about pressure. I’ve given a 100+ talks over the last year, but none were as difficult as this one. The reason is simple: I was trying to help students both broadly and specifically. Featured in my talk is a Temple student named David. He really needs help NOW. I understood that my talk might help him get there. I also increasingly recognize the crossroads we are at: people are scared of college. They are starting to count themselves out. At the same time, there are many people running for president who want to do something about that. So now, more than ever, if you are worried about college prices you have to VOTE.
TEDxPhiladelphia happened on Wednesday. The Saturday prior, I told my husband that I wanted to pull out. I was afraid of failing. I felt unprepared. Now I’m glad I took the leap — there were high school students in the audience who told me this was the first time they felt hopeful about college again. So, that was a good day. Plus I joined an incredible group of other speakers who are working just as hard to make this world a better place. The video (with my slides) will be online in June. For now, here’s an inexact taste of what I said (meaning, I didn’t read this verbatim).
In June there will be graduation ceremonies all over the country. New high school graduates will listen to commencement speakers. I wonder how many share the words of wisdom I recently overheard a current Temple University student give to a new one.
“Prepare to be punished.”
He wasn’t referring to a frat ritual. This was about a different type of hazing — he was talking about paying for college. And he then told the student about the Cherry Pantry at Temple, because he knows so many of our students don’t have enough to eat.
College is supposed to lift people up, especially people in poverty. It’s been called the great equalizer, giving even people who did badly in high school get a second chance to move forward and get a degree. College for social mobility — college to move up in the world — it’s fundamental to the American Dream.
But these days, college creates at least as much inequality as it alleviates. In an age of austerity, where government support is down, tuition is up, work doesn’t pay, and the social safety net is in tatters, going to college often puts students into debt — worse off than if they hadn’t gone at all. This is the new economics of college.
Does this mean college isn’t worth it? Should more people just skip it and go straight to work?
These are questions my students at Temple, Philadelphia’s only public university, struggle with in my class “Why Care About College?”
They say they go to college to get ahead in life and make sure that life is stable. Some go to college so that they won’t fall behind and live a life worse than their parents’.
They’re not wrong to do this. Good jobs that don’t require at least some college — at least community college — are hard to find. 80% of all good jobs demand education beyond high school — whether it’s in the trades or the liberal arts, some sort of additional credential is required.
But the road to those degrees is rough. My team’s research reveals that as many as 1 in 2 college students is dealing with food insecurity. 1 in 10 experience homelessness. Why bother?
Malik is hoping it’s worth it. The youngest of 6, including a twin sister, Malik started at Pierce College. But he struggled in remedial courses and failed out fast. He tried again at Drexel, filing for financial aid, and getting a job. But the financial aid arrived too late, and working GrubHub never paid enough. He dropped out again.
Now Malik is one of my students. At 22 years old he’s $14,000 in debt. He lives at home with his mom, supporting her as she endures treatment for cancer. The struggle is real — he works at Jefferson Hospital to supplement his financial aid, juggling school and work and family. While he wants to become the first in his family to get a degree, he isn’t sure it will ever happen. “I still have dreams,” he told me recently. “But the bills are tight, even for food.”
Like Malik, Tink just finished her second year at Temple. She’s the oldest of three in a New Jersey family. Her single mom’s job in accounting places them firmly in the middle-class, but their resources pale in comparison to the cost of out-of-state tuition. The partial Pell grant Tink gets doesn’t begin to cover her costs, so she works 35 to 40 hours a week at Target. But every couple of months Target cuts her hours, making it hard for her to pay rent or even feed herself. Last year, a Parent PLUS loan help, but when she re-applied this year, her mom failed the credit check. Now Tink and her mom are trying to make it work without loans. She says the need for money is “sitting on my head every day.”
David is from Lancaster, and started at Temple in 2007, right out of high school. He is proud to be the first in his family to attend college and since he’s good at math, he wants to be an electrical engineer. David’s also gay — a fact his parents only became aware of during his sophomore year at Temple. When they found out, they cut him off, leaving him to fend for himself and pay for college alone. But since their info is on his financial aid application he didn’t qualify for aid, even a private loan, and couldn’t make ends meet. So David left college.
At 25, he came back, now considered “independent” and qualified for financial aid. But aid felt short of his costs — Temple doesn’t have a big endowment for scholarships — and so he withdrew from a class to make time to work. Just like David’s aid was revoked. He fought to get it back, only to learn that now he’d “timed out” of aid eligibility.
Last year David turned 29. He had to beg and borrow to get through classes, couldn’t pay his rent, and faced eviction. These were things he wanted to talk about with his professors — but they didn’t know. David’s hope — for his college to treat him like a human — didn’t happen.
Finally, he got emergency aid from the FAST Fund, administered by Temple’s faculty union. Last week he graduated from Temple with that degree in electrical engineering. Even so, he can’t get his transcripts to apply for graduate school because he owes Temple $13,000. (PLEASE HELP HIM — Here’s the GoFundMe.)
Honestly, what’s happening to these students reminds me of the Wu Tang Clan’s song CREAM. Cash Rules Everything Around Me. With money weighing on their minds, scarcity ruling their every day, they are stressed. They are strained. They are scared.
They feel the broken promises. When they were 5 years old they thought college was about education, money, being an adult, getting a job, success and opportunity. But now college is just debt and stress — they worry about their future and think maybe they’ve been scammed.
This is ridiculous. America is eating its seed corn, crippling generations of students who work hard and get nowhere. I wish my Temple students were the exception, but since I’ve spent 20 years studying college students all over the country I know that they aren’t. This is #RealCollege now — not dorms and parties and mom and dad paying the bills. 14 million students work while going to college, and 1 in 5 of them has children. Middle class and working class students now get to attend college — it is no longer as white, wealthy, and male as it once was — but they are put through hell in an attempt to finish it.
But the good news is that there is a better way. College doesn’t have to be dehumanizing. We can fix this problem. And because a college education pays off for entire states, communities, and economies we can more than afford it.
Let’s start with accountability. The federal government spends a lot on higher education but that effort isn’t matched by states, and it’s often wasted at for-profit colleges that focus on advertising over instruction. We’ve got to focus on public higher education and create incentives for states share the burden since they share in the benefits. We’ve also got to stop pretending that a financial aid system that focuses only on the poorest people will ever survive American politics (nor is it the most effective approach). We’ve tried it for 50 years, but leaving the middle class out in the cold has killed the Pell program. There’s no policy without politics. The Pell was supposed to cover 100% of the cost of attending a public university like Temple, but today it covers barely 1/3rd. That has everything to do with the fact that voters don’t tend to support programs for people who don’t look like them. Frankly neither do many legislators.
So instead let’s build a college financing system that works for everyone, including people who right now don’t get to go to college. And let’s face facts — with all there is to know how technology, climate, navigating a diverse world — 12 years of education is too little. Just like we decided that elementary school wasn’t enough and made high school free, we have to now go further and push for p-16 system. Remember that the 20th Century was one of the best ever, powered by an innovation economy lifted up by expanded education.
What people used to call trade school, community college, university — all of this is college now. Whether you live at home or live in a residence hall, it doesn’t matter — it’s all about learning more so you can do more. Tuition shouldn’t be a barrier and a lifetime of debt shouldn’t be your bill. That only serves to keep people down, not lift them up. Heck, we offer free lunch to 12th graders because it makes sense, so why not college students too?
Investing in education isn’t about free giveaways, but rather about payoffs. Maybe other people’s children will never eat at your dinner table, but trust me, it matters to you whether they become gainfully employed taxpayers. Investing together is cheaper than investing alone. Churches do it, families do it, and nations can do it too.
America promises that hard work will pay off. Today’s students are working their way through college but it isn’t getting them anywhere. We owe them better. No one should be punished for wanting a degree.
