College is creating poverty | Sara Goldrick-Rab | TEDxPhiladelphia

good morning next month all over the country young people will graduate from high school imagine being one of them sitting there with your family ready to go off to the next step in your life and you're listening to the commencement speaker how many of these students will hear the words of wisdom offered by one of our Temple University students recently when speaking to a prospective student prepare to be punished this advice from one student to another overheard as I was walking to class struck me and then I was further taken aback as he went on to refer the student to Temple zone cherry pantry a food pantry that opened on our campus in January of last year this pantry offers students free food and it's necessary because more than one in three students at our public university deal with food insecurity the truth is though that most people going off to college have no idea that this is happening they have no idea that anyone would view college as punishment because they and their families see higher education as part of the great investment that view of college as a wonderful investment as something that will pay off leads them to do things like take student loans they believe that they'll rise up in the world they believe that they will gain and that their family will begin to get ahead but the new economics of college have changed those ideas and made them far more difficult to become realities the new economics of college my research over the last 20 years show include not only things like rising tuition which is something we all lament every day but also the rising price of rent food housing medical care gas all of those things the clothes on your back the things you need in order to do what you're doing right now sitting and listening and learning today's college students are radically different than those who went to college thirty years ago and that's a good thing because higher education used to be a place that was only male that was predominantly white and was only a pathway that you could pursue if your family had wealth today as students most of them don't have parents who could pay five hundred thousand dollars to cheat their way into college my students though my one of my classes at Temple I teach an undergraduate course it's a gen ed and it was created by the president of this university it's called why care about college and during that class we talked a lot about what brought them to school what they go through while they're in school and what it's going to take to get them to graduation one of the things you can see when you look at their data is that most of them did go to college for the reasons I mentioned previously they don't want to fall behind in the world they're not so much trying to get rich but they're just trying to be okay and they know the economic realities of course it is possible to get a job without a college degree everybody has an anecdote about somebody who got rich without doing anything beyond high school but the data are really really clear eighty percent of good jobs in this country require at least some education after high school now that does not have to be a bachelor's degree in philosophy or women's studies are one of the other disciplines that so many pundits like to trash it can just be a certificate let's say to help you become a veterinary technical assistant even mechanics now need at least some education after high school so they can operate the computers in the cars and that education comes in the nation's community colleges but things aren't going well there my team has been studying the well-being of college students now for the last decade the statistics you see up there the statistics about the number of students enduring homelessness during college which we estimate at around one in ten the statistics which tell us that as many as half of the nation's college students don't have secure regular access to affordable and nutritious food which the United States Department of Agriculture calls food insecurity these statistics tell a story that students have known about for a long time but that we the public have too long ignored the only reason that I know these things is because of the students and their bravery and fast forward study after study after study over place and time and depending on who the researcher I doesn't even seem to matter we're finding these issues at colleges all over the United States it's becoming very clear the college is actually creating poverty so you have to ask it's college even worth it that is in many ways political question there are those who weren't even sure that we should have expanded education to include high school and now at a moment when college seems more important forever than ever they're looking at these issues and saying you know maybe college isn't for everyone while at the same time they go home and take a portion of their paycheck and invested in their child's 529 account and strategize how they're gonna get their kid into the best school but college isn't for everyone Malik would disagree Malik is one of those students in my why care about college class and I didn't meet him under the most ideal circumstances to be honest with you I was up there lecturing in front of him and Malik fell asleep like all good professors I have a little bit of self-righteousness about this I'm a little upset I have to wonder am i boring no I'm not boring you're just not as into it as you should be okay well but knowing what I know and knowing what I know from my own research I was forced when looking at Malik to wonder what I did not know and so towards the end of that class I went over and I sat down next to him and I looked at him and I said are you okay and he looked at me and said no and then Malik told me that his mom is going through treatment for cancer it turns out Malik is far from alone in being an undergraduate who's actually not receiving much support from his parents but rather providing that support we find that undergraduates are even having to take on additional loans so that they can help their parents to stay afloat in Malik's case I can assure you this is an educational expense if Malik wasn't able to do that he would have to quit school and work longer hours to be able to afford someone to be with his mom it has been a tough struggle and he told me that frankly he's having so much difficulty that each day he's not sure that he will have enough money to eat tink sat across the classroom from Malik and she totally gets it although her situations different tink is from New Jersey her mom's got a couple of kids and actually a pretty good job she's an accountant the problem is that that family is stuck in the murky middle of the financial aid system they're basically told well you're not poor enough to get a full Pell Grant but clearly you're not rich enough to be able to go to college without grants so all they qualify for are loans and despite all the talk about how many loans have big the dollars are with loans the loan limits are actually pretty low an undergraduate like ting can only get fifty five hundred dollars a year to cover her expenses the unmet need for a student like tink at Temple is over fifteen thousand dollars a year as a result her mom decided she had no choice but to take what's called the Parent PLUS loan this requires a credit check and the first year for tink they got it and the second year her mom failed the credit check so this past year that she'd been trying to go to college without those dollars and again finding that things were getting so tight she wasn't even sure she'd make her rent or be able to pay for her food the last student I want to tell you about is David now David wasn't a student of mine in my class but I met him when he fell into hard times but things were not always hard for David in fact David's from Lancaster and he's got all the things going for him that you would think really would make it for a student he's really motivated he's really good at math in fact he wants to be an electrical engineer and he's got two parents with good jobs this is an ideal student from our perspective and he was when he was 18 years old and he started temple he thrived he made it through his first year he got into his second year and then David like so many young people decided that he was finally gonna take ownership of his life and tell his parents the truth David is gay when David's parents heard this information they were not happy and they cut him off financially David tried to make it work without his parents he went to the financial aid office he told them look it says they have money but I don't have that money anymore I need financial aid it's not temples fault that they couldn't do anything for him those are the federal rules and there's really no mechanism other than trying to establish independence from your parents which is a very difficult process there's no way to take their income out of the calculation of what he could get so David dropped out he tried working he never made much he got really concerned that his life was not going to be going very well and at 25 years old he finally came back to Temple the good news is that 25 years old his parents income no longer counts towards his financial aid eligibility the bad news is that while he got some help temple doesn't have an endowment so efficiently large enough to be offering the kind of institutional aid that our counterparts across town at Penn could provide so he fell short and he tried to work try working as an engineering student it is incredibly hard and he dropped a class in order to accommodate more work and in doing so violated one of the rules of his financial aid and lost some of that support he went steadily through college trying facing eviction from time to time when he paid his rent late and then he timed out if his financial aid eligibility because apparently he'd been into college too long when things got really tough that's when David and I met because he approached the faculty union to seek help from what we call the fast fund a little bit of emergency assistance that we can provide at a moment's notice and that kept David from becoming homeless and as a result I'm very happy to say that last week David became a graduate of Temple University with a degree in electrical engineering but he's not okay you see David needs to go to graduate school next he needs to get a job and David can't get his transcripts released because he owes temple $13,000 he also owes the federal government $50,000 federal government's not going to forgive it and it's not the temples a bad place that doesn't care it's that it can't be going around relieving students of this sort of debt given the budgetary crisis that were in these students they lead me to think about this song from the wu-tang clan I think they're coming to town soon it's called creme if you haven't heard of it I urge you to go check out Spotify there's a playlist for my paying the price book that you might like and you'll you'll hear as you listen to the lyrics of creme that they'll keep repeating that cash rules everything around me cash rules everything around me I'm trying to listen to this ladies lecture to me and cash rules everything around me they tell me that I should get an internship but it doesn't pay and cash rules everything around me this is weighing on students it's getting in the way of their education they are scared they feel betrayed the vision that they had as young children of what college would be is a far cry from what it is now I asked them to talk to me about what college was supposed to be like they talked about having a better future and being an adult and getting a better job and learning they also talked a little bit about parties I mean they thought they would have fun but look at them now when they think of college they think about being broke they think about debt they think about being forever in debt and they have begun to think that college is a scam when we think about the consequences of that for who we are and what education has done for this country it's very very scary this is now real college so my question to you is can we do better than this I think the answer here is yes we can do better we're gonna start with accountability because while the federal government has been making investments in higher education over time pretty consistently in fact states have not one of the reasons that temples in the situation that it's in is that it's a public institution receiving far less state support than it once did this higher education has enrolled more women more people of color and more people from working-class backgrounds states have pulled back on how much money they provide for that students education effectively changing the deal they made with the family and saying never mind we're not going to subsidize this much to make it possible for you you're on your own state support for higher education has been cut by 25 percent on a per student basis over the last 30 years and in the last 10 years alone states have withdrawn nine billion dollars worth of support we've got a deal with the dynamics created by the neglect of the squeezed middle-class when our financial aid system was created it was created with the idea that only a tiny number of students would actually need financial help so we have the FAFSA to put them through those hoops to make them prove their poverty and then to reward them with tremendous grant aid well these days we put them through all those hoops they prove their poverty and then we give them next to nothing and in the meantime there's the middle class there's tinks family sitting there going well I don't get much grant aid and all I can get is loans it makes them upset and frankly when they go to the polls they don't exactly vote to support the programs that are flowing only to the people who make far less money the National School Lunch Program which has been around for more than a hundred years here in Philadelphia is a community-wide program my kids go to DCOs my kids go to Philadelphia public schools I don't know why I thought I was in Washington for a second they go to Philadelphia public schools and unlike when we lived in Wisconsin where I had to pay for school lunch when my kids go to school they can get a free lunch why would the kids of a professor get free lunch it's not that my kids need it it's that it's so much better for the kids who do need it to not have to be filling out applications we know that elementary school children who get free lunch and then grow up to become high school students often don't get it because they're so stigmatized they don't want to be seen as getting the free lunch program so here everybody just gets it and we're not doing that because it's a giveaway and then nobody will actually care about the food we're doing it because children cannot learn if they cannot eat this is what we need to think about in higher education at a moment we're three and four American families really need help paying for college is it really worth making them jump through a million hoops distinguish between the needy and the non needy the deserving and the non deserving so we can save ourself a few bucks or maybe we should go for impact and focus on getting the assistance to everybody so that the people at the bottom can really really benefit we've done this before at the start of the 20th century we began to recognize it was not a good decision for this country for young people to finish elementary school and then go off to work in factories we decided to make high school free and it wasn't easy and it didn't happen overnight but we did it and it changed our entire country it is increasingly hard to imagine where we would be right now if we had not done that and because the world became more technologically complex because we are now more global it's harder and harder for teachers to fit all that material that students need to learn into just 12 years our public schools are not bad places our teachers are not lazy our teachers have their hands full my children have to learn Internet safety in the classroom they have to learn the rules for plagiarism with online sources stuff that I never even imagined having to learn they have to learn more languages they have to learn how to navigate complicated politics so maybe it doesn't fit into 12 years anymore maybe we go for the 13th and 14th and maybe further and if that's what we need then frankly we need to make it to ition free we can do this one of two ways one way that we can try to make things better is one by one by one each of us can decide all right I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna put more money into that 529 I'm gonna keep on talking to my neighbors about how college costs too much and now we're gonna make those colleges lower their prices we can lament we can worry we can stress or we can act and to act together is gonna be far more effective if you think college costs too much then you need to act like it and vote if you think college costs too much and you don't like the debt then look at the plans of the people running for office whether at the local level the state level or the federal level and ask are you actually going to make this better we can do that together we can pay for it together tax reform would help but the fact is that if we dealt with the accountability issues I described we can already afford this I think we have to because I really don't think that anyone should be punished for trying to get an education thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 62,059

Rating: 4.6863084 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Education, Education reform, Food, Higher education, Poverty, Schools, Students

Id: dSqW43aTuRM

Length: 20min 36sec (1236 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/mellowmonk]

No, it's "Corporations have figured out how to fleece people more than ever over college."

The problem isn't college. The problem is the fleecing.

[u/YOUREABOT]

Wow

[u/taylorhayward_boston]

If you study things that will make you more money, then not so much. People look at school as a natural extension of high school, and not as the investment it is. You need to be shrewd how you spend your money. I never even went to college. Saved a ton of cash.