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The Real World
Este Griffith had it all figured out. When she graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in April 2001, she had her sights set on one thing: working for a labor union.The real world had other ideas. Griffith left school with not only a degree, but a boatload of debt. She owed $15,000 in student loans and had racked up $4,000 in credit card debt for books, groceries and other expenses. No labor union job could pay enough to bail her out.
So Griffith went to work instead for a Washington, D.C., firm that specializes in economic development. Problem solved? Nope. At age 24, she takes home about $1,800 a month, $1,200 of which disappears to pay her rent. Add another $180 a month to retire her student loans and $300 a month to whittle down her credit card balance. "You do the math," she says.
Griffith has practically no money to live on. She brown-bags her lunch and bikes to work. Above all, she fears she'll never own a house or be able to retire. It's not that she regrets getting her degree. "But they don't tell you that the trade-off is the next ten years of your income," she says.
That's precisely the deal being made by more and more college students: They're mortgaging their futures to meet soaring tuition costs and other college expenses. Like Griffith, they're facing a one-two punch at graduation: hefty student loans and smothering credit card debt -- not to mention a job market that, for now anyway, is dismal.
"We are forcing our children to make a choice between two evils," says Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law professor and expert on bankruptcy. "Skip college and face a life of diminished opportunity, or go to college and face a life shackled by debt."
Don't think this Catch-22 only traps those shelling out big bucks for schools like Harvard or Yale. The eight in ten paying for a public college or university are also in for sticker shock. For the past two decades, tuition at these schools has zoomed far above inflation. Last year, the annual tuition and fees at four-year public colleges averaged $4,081 (room and board added another $5,582). That was a leap from the previous year of 9.6 percent -- six times the rate of inflation, then less than 2 percent. This year, the increase at certain schools was even more dramatic. Tuition at the University of Virginia and the University of California rose nearly 30 percent, and at the University of Arizona it jumped by 40 percent.
For some time, colleges have insisted their steep tuition hikes are needed to pay for cutting-edge technologies, faculty and administration salaries, and rising health care costs. Now there's a new culprit: shrinking state support. Caught in a severe budget crunch, many states have sharply scaled back their funding for higher education.
Someone had to make up for those lost dollars. And you can guess who -- especially if you live in Massachusetts, which last year hiked its tuition and fees by 24 percent, after funding dropped by 3 percent, or in Missouri, where appropriations fell by 10 percent, but tuition rose at double that rate. About one-third of the states, in fact, have increased tuition and fees by more than 10 percent.
One of those states is California, and Janet Burrell's family is feeling the pain. A bookkeeper in Torrance, Burrell has a daughter at the University of California at Davis. Meanwhile, her sons attend two-year colleges because Burrell can't afford to have all of them in four-year schools at once.
Meanwhile, even with tuition hikes, California's community colleges are so strapped for cash they dropped thousands of classes last spring. The result: 54,000 fewer students.
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