209: Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream

Ethan Sawyer  0:09  
This is Ethan Sawyer, aka College Essay Guy. My goal is to bring more ease, joy and purpose into the college application process. You like what I said? Purpose. Welcome to the CEG podcast, where it's my job to interview some of the brilliant minds in the college admissions world, analyze their genius and break it down for you into a series of practical, actionable steps that you can take, whether you're the one applying to college or you're helping somebody else apply. So I enjoyed doing the first series on access and equity so much that I thought, hey, why not do it again? This episode is the first of a three part series focusing on paying for college. My guest for this first episode is Dr Sarah Goldrick Rob, Professor of higher education policy and Sociology at Temple University, author of paying the price college costs, financial aid and the betrayal of the American dream. On this episode, we discuss why has paying for college become such a problem anyway, which students are most impacted by needs in security, and why don't students tell their stories of struggle more often? How is the current financial aid system broken? And what are some solutions? How can students avoid getting into debt without getting a degree? Advice for students who are currently applying and a really, really specific way that you, dear listener, can make a difference. This is one of my favorite podcasts yet I was blown away by Dr Goldrick Rab in her work. Enjoy. Hi folks. My guest today is Sarah Goldrick Rab. She is the professor of higher education policy and Sociology at Temple University and founder of the Hope Center for college, community and justice in Philadelphia, as well as the Wisconsin Hope Lab. Dr Goldberg grabs commitment to scholar activism is evidenced by her broad profile of research and writing, dissecting the intended and unintended consequences of the college for all movement in the United States in more than a dozen experimental, longitudinal and mixed methods studies, she's examined the efficacy and distributional implications of financial aid policies, welfare reform, transfer practices and a range of interventions aimed at increasing college attainment among marginalized populations. Dr Goldberg grab is best known for innovative research on food and housing insecurity in higher education, having led the four largest national studies on the subject, and for her work on making public higher education free. Dr Goldberg, grab, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. So I just wanted to set context for folks. And you know, some folks may not even know what you know, what it means when they hear food and housing insecurity. So would you mind just giving us a little bit of you know definition of terms and give us a sense of what the premise of your book paying the price is.


Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab  2:45  
Well, the premise of my book is that students are having trouble paying for college, which I know is pretty much common sense at this point, but a lot of people, including policy makers, still don't seem to believe it. They like to assume that every college student has two parents who are helping them to pay for school, that financial aid is generous and that if they need a job, they can get a job and it'll pay pretty well. I don't find that to be true. You know, the book is based on a study that I did following 3000 college students over six years, and we found that things were incredibly broken. And one of the things that we learned, which really did surprise us, was that the bills were getting so tight that students were having trouble securing regular access to affordable, nutritious food, which is what the United States Department of Agriculture calls food insecurity. And we also found that they were often having trouble paying their bills, for their housing, keeping their utilities on, you know, the things like electricity and water. And some of them were getting evicted and even ending up homeless. And while that's not everybody, it is such a significant portion of undergraduates that it's kind of remarkable that we continue to talk as if people are just fine when they're going to college.


Ethan Sawyer  4:10  
And what is your sense like? Why has college become so unaffordable, and why is there such a you know? Why has this become such a problem food insecurity and housing insecurity, for example?


Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab  4:22  
Well, I think that the usual explanation is colleges are charging more, and particularly in terms of tuition. And that's certainly true, tuition is an issue, and it's especially being driven up as states change the bargain that they've made with the people who live in their states. States used to say, go to college, go to a public college, and we will take care of most of the bills, and you'll just pay a little bit of it. And instead, they switched and said, you know, well, we'll pay a little bit, and you pay the most. So tuition is certainly an issue. But the other thing is that the major cost of attending college, those are living costs, and those. Things have gone up, even when tuition hasn't. So rent continues to climb, the price of food continues to climb. It's more expensive to buy gas for the car, it's more expensive to get health care, and as a result, students are being crunched on those other costs of attending college. The other thing that's really important is that while students have always worked their way through college, and today's students work at higher rates than almost anybody ever has. Work doesn't pay, the value of the minimum wage is down, and there's a lot of competition among part time workers like college students for those jobs. So when a student says, look, I've got to go to class tomorrow. I can't make this shift. The employer is fairly likely to say, well, then you don't have a job with us anymore, and just readily replace them with somebody who's not in college. So that's another really important part of the story.


Ethan Sawyer  5:55  
What is hashtag real college?


Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab  5:59  
Hashtag real college is a movement that we've begun leveraging social media to help people really understand that the way college used to be is not the way college is now, that what people see on TV living in residence halls, you know, students eating sushi in the cafeteria, what they envision is not real, and what real college is now is about going to college without enough money to make it. It's about going at a time when there isn't even enough advisors. The financial aid offices are strapped with all the questions they're getting. The professors are also visiting food pantries, and it's an incredibly tough time for higher ed. We believe that story has to be told for anything to be done. So on Twitter and on Facebook and on Instagram, we use this hashtag, real college for people to share those stories and to talk to each other about ways to address the problem. Yeah,


Ethan Sawyer  7:02  
I really appreciate it. As a student who, personally, who, you know, showed up on campus and was like, you have to pay what for a book and, you know, and didn't come from money to suddenly see that there was the reality didn't match up with sort of the vision that I'd had and that, you know, I wasn't able to afford things. I was like, hmm. And so as I read this, I laugh and I also feel sad when I read students posts on hashtag college.


Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab  7:28  
That's right, well, in that the students stories are so important, and they often don't tell them because they think that they're alone. And so the other function of this hashtag is to give students a place where they can see that so many other people are dealing with the same stuff, which helps them understand that they did not bring these problems onto themselves, but that rather there must be something structural broken, because so many students are being affected. Right?


Ethan Sawyer  7:55  
One of the things you talk about, and you did an interview with Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, and you talk, you taught, you shared about one of these stories that you said was particularly heartbreaking, where a young woman couldn't study because she didn't have enough food to eat. How did stories like this lead to you focusing lead to your focusing on this?


Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab  8:12  
You know, we were in the middle of a study of financial aid. It was a particular private financial aid program in Wisconsin, and my team, we knew that we were going to learn some things that we didn't know about, but the best way to the best way to kind of find out, as a scientist what you don't know is to go talk to people. And so instead of just collecting, you know, surveys on them, or just looking at their grades and their transcripts, we also had a part of the study where we were going out and interviewing people, and I had a team of graduate students along with myself who go out and sit down with undergrads. And you know, when you're talking to people, one way that scientists do things is we ask a set of prescribed questions, as if we know what matters. Another way of doing it, in my preferred way, is to be very open and just say, how are you and what's going on in your life. And it was by doing that that we started to hear these stories about students dealing with the kinds of struggles that nobody had really been talking about once we heard from students about things like food insecurity. Then, as researchers, we had to go ask ourselves, is this just a handful of sad stories, or is this a fairly widespread problem? And so then we started to go back and collect the survey data. And the survey data very clearly indicate that this is a widespread problem. Once we knew that, honestly, we couldn't just turn our backs on it. I mean, we knew something that seemed like the public didn't know. We knew something researchers were not paying attention to. And so we doubled down and said, Let's really study this. And you know, it's been more than five years now that we've been. Actively pursuing, I'd say, both a science and an activism agenda around this issue. And


Ethan Sawyer  10:07  
in your studies, which students are you finding are most impacted by needs and security?


Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab  10:13  
You know, one of the things that kind of blows my mind is the broad profile of students who are dealing with this. So certainly, I think the group that most people would assume would have these problems are the people who received free and reduced price lunch in high school, students, in other words, from the very bottom part of the income distribution. But while we do see them having these challenges, we also see students from families that most people would agree are firmly middle class. So for example, last week in California, there was report released which showed that a number of students at the University of California system, whose families make $150,000 or more, are still dealing with these problems. And you know, somebody said, Well, that just means the data is bad. And I said, no, it's actually quite obvious that, you know, making 150 to $200,000 in California, that's a hardly guaranteed you can pay your bills, because housing prices are so high, because tuition does cost so much, because work is so hard to find at least work that pays well, and so it's also the case that we see students who have a couple siblings, you know, parents who are working. They're making a modest but decent income. We think all of us could agree, $150,000 of good money, but they're facing bills and debt that mean that their students are falling short when they're in college. So this is a problem that affects white students and black students and Native American students. It's a problem that affects young students and older students. It's a problem that affects community college students and university students. It really does seem to cut across the board. One of


Ethan Sawyer  11:58  
the things I really appreciate about your work and about your book is that you talk about solutions, about potential solutions, rather than just analyzing the problem. And I'd be curious, you know, as it relates, and I know this is a big question I'm gonna throw at you, but as it relates to our current financial aid system, how do you see it as being broken, and how do we solve it, especially given the rising costs of higher education, and this is kind of, I'm just going to throw to the follow up too. Are you optimistic about the possibility of change?


Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab  12:27  
Well, I'm going to start there, because I run something called the Hope Center for college, community and justice. And so by definition, I am optimistic. I do that not because, not to be naive, though this is a, this is a big and massive problem. But because when we have to tackle these big, massive, wicked problems, we need all of our tools. And science shows us very clearly that optimism is a good tool. Positive Psychology emphasizes that it contributes to problem solving. So with that in mind, there are definite, clear problem in the current aid system. One of the biggest problems is that the federal government puts in money and is unable to hold states accountable for also putting in money. So while the federal government has poured money into higher education, states have kept more and more of their own money, defunding their own higher education in their own state, it also does a really bad job of holding colleges accountable for doing honest things for their students. So right now, billions of dollars of federal financial aid flow to for profit colleges like the University of Phoenix, which take those dollars, use them primarily to advertise for more students, and spend very little time on instruction so the students don't get a good education. And then the other part is, we've tended to assume at the federal level that it's always best to focus our limited dollars on students at the very bottom of the income distribution, because they have the most need. While that's true in theory, in practice, it's politically naive when you create a program that's only for the poorest people, the middle class don't participate. As a result, the middle class don't vote for the program, and their legislators also don't support the program. So the Pell Grant, which is focused on the bottom, has been systematically losing its value for 30 years, and no one has done anything about it. So we need a program that looks radically different. We need a program that mandates that states participate in making college affordable, along with the federal government. It should focus on the public sector and not fund for profit colleges, and it needs to be a broad based program that helps the middle class along with people at the bottom of the income distribution, because they all need help paying for college.


Ethan Sawyer  14:59  
You talk a lot about. Students who start college. First of all, I'm before I even get to the next question, I'm blown away by the way that you've laid that out, and that makes a whole lot of sense. And just on my personal like, where I land with that, there's a part of me that's optimistic, and there's this part of me that just feels like the problem is just so big, and so, you know, so it just feels so huge, and there's so much that's entrenched. What do you say to folks who feel like, well, there is no hope. Who've gotten more cynical and feel like they just kind of throw their hands up


Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab  15:30  
well, so I think it's fine to be one of those folks, but they need to remember that there are those of us who have dug in and gone into those needs for years. We're used to fighting battles that are complicated. Policy solutions become solutions because people break them down into the pieces, and they go at them year after year after year until we fix the problem. And that's exactly what those of us who work on policy are supposed to do with what we do all day. And so the important thing is, while it feels overwhelming, you have to still support the work of the people who are going to slog through it to make it better. You know, we didn't get a new deal in this country because it was easy. We didn't make High School free in this country because it was easy or simple. These were massive things that we did. And we did it because there are a lot of US public public servants out there slogging away, doing dealing with the minutia and breaking down those very complicated solutions to difficult problems into manageable pieces and pursuing, you know, pieces of legislation, even when others criticize us for it, because it's not perfect the first time we keep on going. And you know, if you look at the free college movement right now, that's the part that gets me, is that we're on the road to really, finally addressing the price of college through a federal state partnership making tuition free. And yet, when a state rolls out their program, a large number of people who call themselves progressive take hits at it, saying it isn't good enough, telling us it isn't equitable enough, telling us it isn't targeted enough, it doesn't do all the things they wanted it to do, and it kills me because they don't seem to understand that the road to progress is paved with incremental reforms, and to cut us off at the knees in this effort is to set us back, frankly, for decades. So that's what folks really need to understand it's one foot in front of the other, and we will fix a broken system.


Ethan Sawyer  17:45  
Right? Talk to students now for a minute. So you talk about students who start college and then, in some cases, end up with a lot of debt and no degree. How do students avoid ending up in that situation?


Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab  17:58  
Look, I mean, the first thing is that it is important to know that while debt is there and it is scary, college is still worth it. I'm not saying that you're going to become rich from going to college. I am saying that only one in five good jobs in this country is open to people who stop with high school, and that number is going to go down even further over time. So if you want to have a secure life, you have to go to college, but you need to understand there are lots of types of colleges, and you do not need to go to one that you saw on television. You need to go to one that you can honestly and truly afford, and it's perfectly fine to move through college in a fairly slow way, working and going to school, as long as your plan all along is to do that and to stay there until you finish your degree. The number one reason that people struggle with debt is because they did not finish the degree. So they're out in the labor force with just a high school diploma trying to pay off debt from trying to go to college. That doesn't work. So number one, go to a college you can afford, and don't reach too far, because, you know, it's not just paying for one year. It's paying for 234, maybe even five years and two, Stay there, stay in college until you finish. Transfer colleges if you have to to find a better one, but finish the degree, and as you're finishing the degree, enroll in a program from the federal government known as income based repayment, which means that your loan repayments will be indexed or aligned to how much you're making. So if you're making a little, you'll only pay a little. If you're making a lot, you'll pay a lot if you're not making anything and you're in this program and you file your paperwork, then you will not be penalized for being unemployed. So those are the three things that I would do, and in the meantime, keep voting for people who can fix the situation so that students don't have to go through this in the future. Sure, really


Ethan Sawyer  20:01  
practical. Thank you. What what advice you have for students who are currently applying for college, especially when it comes to evaluating their financial aid packages? I know you've kind of touched on this, but are there any particular resources you'd recommend in terms of that?


Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab  20:15  
You know, the first thing is, the financial aid letters that you get are often very incomplete. They do not reveal the full cost of attending that college. You need to make sure that you know what the tuition is. And on top of that, you need to know what they're estimating your books and supplies and housing and food and transportation and medical costs are going to be their estimate is, however, an estimate, and oftentimes it's wrong. So I want you to add at least $5,000 per year on top of their guests, and then ask yourself, can I through a combination of grants, loans, work, study, if they have it, and working through college. Can I make this work? And can I make it work year after year, look at each of those letters. If a school that costs $100,000 gives you a $40,000 grant, go ahead and pat yourself on the back and then remember that you still have to pay $60,000 a year. If a school that charges $15,000 a year gives you $10,000 of support, don't look at it as not as good a school, because it doesn't cost as much money to go there. Take a good, honest, hard look at what your state offers you for your local colleges and universities, because they usually are very good places to get at least the first two years of college done at a lower cost, and putting your family and you into economic jeopardy to go to college is not necessarily the right thing to do, but whatever you do, don't just pass it up because the jobs available to people who only have high school are getting fewer and further between.


Ethan Sawyer  22:07  
A lot of the folks who listen to the podcast are counselors or college counselors. What advice would you give to them, as you know, in terms of their work with students when they're applying to college? And are there any particular resources?


Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab  22:20  
Sure. Well, look first to the counselors who work in public schools. I am so sorry that you have been so disrespected and cut for so long at a time when we need you to have more time to spend with students, to help them prepare for the next step. You've been given less time and less resources, and I worry that it has left you only focusing on the FAFSA. Now the FAFSA, which is a small American bureaucratic tragedy, is access to a limited amount of money. It is not going to solve these students financial problems, but it is going to help. So yes, they need to do it, if they can do it, and if their family won't let them, then consider seeing if you can help these students to file as independents. Secondly, please be very real with them about what it's going to take to pay for college. They need to have a plan for how to work during school, because the vast majority of students will do it. Many of them come thinking they'll just deliver pieces or drive Uber. They don't realize that's never going to pay enough money. So they need to put their schedules together so that they can allocate, not only for a lack of finances, or what we would call financial poverty, but also for a lack of time, or what we call time poverty. Again, I know it's a lot because you have very limited number of hours in the day, but when you are talking to these students, do what you can to get them the full picture of what it's going to take to get through school, so that they know what they're getting into. And the last thing is that the most important thing they can do while they're in college is ask for help. And maybe they need to practice doing that. They need to know that everybody asks for help. The rich students in college ask for help all the time, and people give it to them. Other students should not feel ashamed in speaking up when they need some help. I


Ethan Sawyer  24:18  
want to end on hope, because in some ways, as I hear you talk, I feel and sense that the situation is dire and there's a lot that's wrong with the world. But one of the things I appreciate about your work and your message is that there is the possibility of a better future. What would you say to folks? How could they be a part of this better future? What can we do?


Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab  24:39  
Look if we we have a really great moment in Bravo, which is called the presidential election. And you know, there are certainly points in history where these things matter more and less. We're at the point where it matters so much, and even without getting into all the other social issues that this election will. Speak to let's just look at this paying for college issue. There are going to be candidates running for president who could literally get rid of the student loan debt that's holding back so many people, current college students, who are wrapping up debt and worrying about it every night, need to understand that there are people running for president who could get rid of that stress. They need to decide if they're going to vote for somebody who says they'll do that, who has a plan, or for somebody who says those dollars are your fault. They're yours to repay, and you should just be responsible. There are people running for president who have promised to drive down the price of college and make it more possible for students going forward, to go to college and get the degrees they want. There are other people who want to privatize the system, people who think we shouldn't even have public higher education, people who think that today's college students are lazy and entitled and just need to work harder figure out which candidate you want to get behind and vote, because that's the only way we're going to change this system. We have had presidents before that broadened access to higher education. We had presidents before who voted to create the nation's community colleges and voted to create the Pell Grant. They, in turn, work with congressional leaders to do the same. This is the chance to do it, and that's what the debate is going to be about over the next year to year and a half. And my hope is that people will recognize that opportunity and take that opportunity to make a big, difference.


Ethan Sawyer  26:40  
Dr Goldrick Rab, thank you so much for your time.


Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab  26:43  
Thanks for having me.


Ethan Sawyer  26:47  
Thanks friends for listening. You'll find all the show notes at college. Sa guy.com/podcast, my next episode is with Lauren shandonval, a fourth year public policy student at the University of Michigan who was recently featured on NPR after creating something called the being not rich guy, a crowd sourced document that offers practical advice to students from low and middle income backgrounds, the final episode in this series is with Joan Lu, whom you'll remember from the podcast on the Nepali students who have their scholarships revoked, Joan will share tons of financial aid tips For international students and their counselors. Thanks for listening. You.


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