Dove's Eye View

Don't Borrow For College

Here's some advice from The Dove: if faced with Fewer Options Open to Pay for Costs of College, consider changing your plans.

Fewer Options Open to Pay for Costs of College By JONATHAN D. GLATER Published: April 12, 2008

Parents will have to navigate unfamiliar and difficult terrain when it comes time to pay for college this year, with student loan companies in turmoil and banks tightening their standards and raising rates on other types of borrowing.

Hey folks. If you have to go into debt to pay for your child's college, maybe you should consider sending the kid to a different college?

The article quotes a mother in Mill Valley who wants to borrow $5,000 a year to send her daughter to a local community college. I don't understand this. California community colleges have lowered their tuition to $15 a credit - so two full semesters would be about $500. Books are very expensive - say $750 for books. That's $1,250. What's the other $3,750 for? College level coursework at community college is fully transferable to all California universities in the UC and CSU systems, so at $500 a year tuition for two years, parents have saved a boat load of cash over a four year education. Is the level of teaching lower - unfortunately, it could well be, and the level of students could be lower, too. But I have known many intelligent, well-educated Californians who did their first two years at community college and finished at Cal or UCLA or similar.

Now the parents who want to take out loans against their houses, or sign their children up for student loans - how are they going to repay? Do they know? Is the education worth it? Why borrow $10K a year, saddling the young person with $40k+ of debt right out of college?

The best gift you can give is to help the student choose a college based on what s/he can afford, while minimizing loans. Then after college the young person is not hamstrung by debt. OK you might want to borrow something. But seriously consider the cost/benefit to borrowing all that cash to get through school. Look at state schools, community colleges, part-time programs.

A bachelor's degree does not guarantee a high-paying job. Borrowing to pay for that degree won't help your bottom line.

Meanwhile - perhaps if all that easy student loan money dries up, colleges will have to bring their tuitions down to reasonable amounts. College tuition has climbed much faster than the consumer price index for more than a generation. Once upon a time a student could work a summer job waiting tables and earn tuition for the year. Now such a job would pay for a few textbooks, while the tuition might cost as much as the parent's yearly earnings. ($40K, $50K). I have a theory that the easy money student loans, and American consumers' willingness to take out such loans, have fueled the inordinate inflation of college tuition.

Get off the runaway train and pay what you can afford for college. Don't let them enslave you with debt after graduation.

People's Grocery of Oakland

Poor people in the inner city often don't have access to nutritious, healthy food, since the only food markets sell pre-processed junk items and maybe a few miserable vegetables. Many residents don't have cars, so they can't drive to nice markets in better-favored areas. Folks are talking about this over at Mark Bittman's blog today - check out the thread.

Here's one solution: The People's Grocery in West Oakland, a food group operating in a devastated, high-crime residential and industrial district.

People's Grocery is a community-based organization in West Oakland that develops creative solutions to the health, environmental and economic challenges our community faces every day.

The number one cause of death in West Oakland is not violence, but heart disease - accounting for 29% of all deaths from 1996-1998. Source: Alameda County Public Health Department of Vital Statistics

We want to change the way the food system works. Our mission is to develop a self-reliant, socially just and sustainable food system in West Oakland through community-based, youth-focused and innovative social enterprises, urban agricultural projects, educational programs and public policy initiatives that foster healthy, equitable and ecological community development.

We believe everyone deserves healthy food, regardless of income. In our view, it's about "food justice" - the human right to Healthy Food for Everyone.

The People's Grocery runs community gardens, a food warehouse and a mobile grocery (in a van) that wanders around the neighborhood, selling good food, some of it locally produced, to folks who cannot reach the abundant groceries and produce markets of our city.

People's Grocery also sponsors all manner of education projects that teach cooking and nutrition. Three or four recent college graduates founded the group several years ago, and look what they have accomplished!

Read this essay on food policy for more background, and check out Food First!, an Oakland food policy think tank.

The American Community College

Today I start teaching English 1A (Freshman Composition and Reading) at a local community college. Here is a post from The Washington Monthly to make my heart glad:

How good are community colleges compared to 4-year universities? A few years ago a group of educational reformers created an annual survey (the NSSE) that measured how well universities implemented research-proven best teaching practices, and then followed that up with a similar survey for community colleges (the CCSSE). Kevin Carey writes in our current issue that the results were surprising:

    On a number of important measures, the [community] colleges on our list outperform their four-year peers. More than two-thirds of the community college students ask questions in class or contribute to class discussions, compared to only half of the four-year students. Student-faculty interaction is also better — the community college students are more likely to get prompt feedback on performance and to interact with their professors during and outside of class. And the level of academic challenge is more than comparable — the community college students were more likely to work harder than they thought they could to meet their professor's expectations.

Wish me luck. We'll be reading the Seymour Hersh profile of Anthony Taguba later in the semester, among many other essays; and we're reading Laila Lalami's novel of migration, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits.

Next term I want to teach Titus Andronicus and show the Juliette Tamor film. Next term.