Making college more affordable: What needs discussing is the total cost of a degree

Editor’s note: When it comes to the cost of higher education in the U.S., signs of trouble abound.

For instance, states now rely more heavily on tuition to finance their public colleges and universities than on government funding.

Private colleges and universities are also struggling to make ends meet, steering a record amount of tuition revenue toward grant aid for economically needy students.

Meanwhile, the number of student borrowers who defaulted on their student loans edged up last year as did the price of higher education itself.

So we asked our panel of presidents — from Xavier University of Louisiana, Colorado College and Penn State: Given this reality, what are the top two or three things that you believe need to happen to make college more affordable — particularly for low-income students, students of color and the working class?

The high level of tuition in U.S. universities can be blamed on many factors. On top of shrinking state appropriations there are more technology-intensive degrees in every field; an aging campus infrastructure; a sharp increase in compliance and regulations reporting; and soaring health care costs.

University administrators should be deeply concerned that our price is limiting access to an education that enables upward mobility. Interestingly, the conversation on access and affordability seems to be fixated on controlling, first and foremost, the increase in tuition. We need to broaden the framing of this discussion considerably.

The first step is to change the conversation to one of the total cost of a degree. The simple fact is that timely completion of a degree is a critical mechanism to control total cost. A tuition increase pales in comparison to going to school for another year. 

The second step is to recognize that the only thing worse than going five and six years in order to graduate, is to accumulate debt and drop out before graduation.

Universities like Penn State are justifiably proud of their high graduation rates. However, when you dig deeper, you discover that first-generation, need-based students have a dramatically lower graduation rate than most of their peers. At Penn State, they graduate 22 percentage points below the average. We can point to many factors that cause [this graduation gap], but it’s clearly not due to lack of ambition.

Sixty-two percent of these students work an average of 22 hours a week, usually at minimum wage jobs, so they can’t take a full credit load. It is impossible to graduate in four years. They drop classes more frequently than other students and tend to have lower grades because of their work load. Sadly, they also don’t have time to participate in advantageous activities, such as research or internships. They get discouraged. They either give up or end up attending a fifth or sixth year at a significant cost. If they graduate, they have paid more and gotten less from the experience than other students. 

Our universities need a laser-like focus on mitigating all factors that slow the time to the completion of a degree. Every student should have access to financial literacy advisers and tools that help students take the most cost-efficient way to achieve a degree. We need “completion” programs to be a priority and not allow students to slip away because of finances or other hardships.

We can serve our mission of upward mobility and save students millions in costs and debt if we help every student, regardless of financial capability, to graduate, and graduate on time.