College costs too much. Ask the parents who are moving their kids in this Labor Day weekend. Ask anyone who has ever sent a kid to one, or who worries about someday sending one.
A college education remains a great value in the long run, providing massive intangible benefits - the value of learning, of being exposed to new ways of seeing the world - as well as very tangible ones in the form of increased earning potential. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2012 data found the median weekly income for those with a high school diploma was $652; for those with a bachelor's degree it was $1,066.
And the economic need for college graduates is projected to grow at a faster pace than the graduation rates. The economy needs college grads, in other words, and will for the foreseeable future.
But the cost of college has risen steeply in the last two decades - from an average cost, in inflation-adjusted dollars, of $7,759 a year in 1980 to $18,133 in 2010, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The impact of that is very real. Not only is student loan debt an economic burden - for example, it reduces vehicle spending by as much as $201.8 million annually just in Wisconsin, according to a study by the liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now - but also high costs risk excluding a large swath of the American middle class from access to higher education.
That would be a tragedy that would only serve to divide us and hobble economic growth. We need college to be accessible, and on the spiraling path we're on, it won't be.
President Barack Obama called attention to this problem in a recent policy speech, and laid out some policies that would help to begin to address it. Higher education is a complex system and there is not a simple solution. But Obama's proposals would move us in the right direction. Here is some of what Obama proposes:
? A new federal ranking system would provide information for families about the quality of higher education institutions - and would include affordability as one of its criterion for the ranking.
? Financial aid would be tied to college performance. It is a proposal analogous to the way we're seeing hospitals move from a "pay for procedure" to a "pay for performance" model. This would create incentives that would help keep costs lower.
? Graduates would have the ability to cap their payments at 10 percent of their monthly income. This "pay as you earn" system is available to some students now, but would be expanded under Obama's proposals.
? In addition to that, though, students receiving financial aid would face new accountability measures. For example, they would receive payments over time, not in a single lump sum - meaning if they drop out, their payments would stop coming right away, not next term.
There are good reasons that the government provides generous access to student loans. We all benefit in the form of a growing economy when more of us have more education. While loan amounts must be limited in some form, it would be a mistake to think the best way forward is to sharply curtail access to loans. That would only serve to bar the way into the American middle class.
And here's an aspect of the issue Obama's proposals cannot capture by themselves: There are basic choices individual students and individual families need to take responsibility for, and one of these is taking reasonable steps to avoid being in more debt than they can handle.
Choosing a college can be a time of anxiety - your kids' futures feel like they are at stake. But it is right and responsible to consider affordability to be an important concern when making that decision.
In the University of Wisconsin System, the cost of sending kids to school in one of the state's two-year colleges, like UW Marathon County, before they move on to a four-year college can be dramatically lower than sending them to UW-Madison for four years. Base tuition for a full-time Wisconsin resident at UWMC is $2,558; it's $5,202 at UW-Madison. And that doesn't take into account additional costs for room and board and so on.
But the quality of education for students who start at UWMC won't be lower. On the level of the individual consumer, we can vote with our wallets by choosing more affordable paths to a degree.
Obama's proposals should be understood as the beginning of this conversation, not the last word in fixing high college costs. But it is an important discussion for our nation to have.