Government should do more for students

Declining support could end up harming nation in the long run

By Jackie Womack
The Collegian

THE HARSH REALITIES of attending school always become evident at this time of the year: papers are due, finals are coming up, tuition bills for Spring 2007 start showing up and financial information starts to get gathered for the federal student aid filing in January.

Why would students start worrying this soon?

Students — especially poor ones — are often urged to file earlier, in the hopes of getting more aid.

But the sad truth is that the government — despite saying otherwise — doesn’t really want to help lower and middle-income students to get the education that they will need to get ahead.

Despite rising tuition costs nationwide, last year the feds actually chopped down the Pell grant by $120 on average (Pell grants are given to the poorest students).

This move apparently saved taxpayers a whopping $900 million, which was promptly spent on some quagmire in the Middle East called Iraq.

It wasn’t just students that lost out in this deal, though.

Over the long term, the government and taxpayers lose out.

According to the Princeton Review, a college degree is worth more than $2 million over a 40-year span.

That’s a lot of income taxes that the government won’t get when students can’t afford to stay in college or even attend in the first place.

Not to mention the jobs that employers won’t be able to fill as more and more of the good-paying jobs that are available require college degrees.

If the only thing that the government did were to cut aid, it would be one thing.

However, the federal aid structure actually penalizes poor students who somehow manage to save money by counting it as an asset — even though, if you’re poor, you’re not going to be able to save much.

This penalty comes despite money experts’ advice that people have some kind of savings for emergencies (like car repairs, job loss, etc.) and worries that Americans aren’t saving enough and that young people in particular are buying too much on credit.

Of course, the sensible solution to this problem would be to allow a fallback savings plan: let students have a certain amount of money — say $500 to $1000 — that isn’t counted for student aid and can be used for such emergencies.

And should you make that extra effort and apply for scholarships, the government counts it against you in two different ways — on your next federal aid application and as income on your income taxes.

Yes, the government is really like your local supermarket, which closes checkout lanes when there are already long lines and then charges you twice for one item.

The government’s actions have really encouraged what has been a huge boom in student loans: the feds made 12 million student loans last year and that’s not even counting private and credit card loans/use.

And the emphasis has been to push loans more: when you go to the financial aid office, how many brochures do you see for grants and how many for student loans?

The vast majority are for loans.

In fact, 75 percent of college students across the nation have to take out some kind of loan in order to finish school.

And many of them — about 40 percent — graduate with so much debt that it eats up a big portion of their salary at the jobs that they went to school for.

To quote the movie version of a literary classic, “That’s some catch, that Catch-22.”

The absurdity of having to go into debt to get an education so you can get a better-paying job and then having to pay out most of that better pay to finance your education is mind-boggling.

And in the long run, it’s not just bad and absurd for students; it’s bad for the nation.

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