Getting a Grip on the Real Cost of College Education
mark October 17th, 2007
(Mark) I’ve had an article from a local paper sitting on my desk for a few weeks simmering. “Student loan costs stifle economy:” an AP story about the debt college grads are accruing. For many, it probably seems like just another ripple in the tsunami of fiscal concerns: sub-prime, predatory lending, housing worries, and fuel prices. “Oh, and students are taking their lumps, too,” the piece seems to say.
There is, however, a subtext missed by most. The main “character” in the piece is a law school graduate who is now a legal aid worker. Her concern—however central dollars and cents—is that she may have to stop doing meaningful work and move into “something that I’m not real dedicated to, just for the sake of being able to live.”
In seminary, this was a concern we all faced: How do we get a top-flight education and avoid a debt load that precludes us from going into the most necessary fields: the equally impoverished inner city and rural settings? How do we balance the desire to serve—to create a better world—with the desire to have the best tools for that service?
In many ways, it is a symptom of the spiral of disempowerment and the concentration of power/capital—intellectual as well as financial. Only here, the destructive effect is more insidious: students are set into what amounts to a new sort of indentured servitude.
It is not the economy, but the individual being stifled by student loans.
There are heroes: individuals who take less traveled roads through the academy, institutions which offer programs that aim directly at public service, and government programs that allow some measure of debt forgiveness. But these heroic efforts, by their very nature, point toward the problem they confront: the concentration of power.
I do not have an answer. In some ways, I am only hoping to highlight the question, to suggest that there is a frameshift necessary, like that Frances recommends in Getting a Grip.
Thank goodness for the heroes, both for struggling towards a better world and for pointing out how our current one falls short of our hopes.
But let each of us also commit ourselves to resistance, to searching for that new frame, and to becoming that hope that we seek in the world.
Peace, Mark
