More to the money story
By: Laura Behling
“I don’t know if you’ve heard this before,” John Pryor, director of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA, wondered, “but finances are on the minds of a lot of people, not just presidents and boards, but also students who are coming to college.”
Thursday’s release of the 2009 CIRP data by the Higher Education Research Institute noted some intriguing principles and practices of today’s first-year college and university students. Fifty-five percent have some concerns about financing college, the highest percentage since 1971; more students are turning to loans to finance college; their fathers are unemployed at the highest percentage in the history of the survey (4.4 percent); and even though academic reputation is still the top reason students choose a particular school, other concerns, such as affordability or offers of financial assistance, are increasingly having an impact on a student’s choice of school. Perhaps needless to say, colleges and universities will need to be able to deal with students who are increasingly anxious about financing their education.
And this is clearly the storyline the major news outlets picked up, as their headlines show: “Annual Poll of Freshmen Shows a Effect of Recession” (New York Times), “UCLA Survey Finds More Freshmen Worried About Finances” (Los Angeles Times), and “Cost of College is a Big Worry of Freshmen in National Survey” (Chronicle of Higher Education).
Our students’ financial concerns certainly do matter, and within the context of endowment losses, discount rates, state funding cuts, and increasing costs, there may be no other story on higher education today more worth talking about.
But to only tell this story—the story of the wallet—can obscure the great possibilities of the wit and the will of both institutions and the students they serve. Those institutions with missions that encompass values of personal and social responsibility, the CIRP results also suggest, should be able to take advantage of the existing high desirability among students for volunteering and should work to facilitate such opportunities. This call was echoed in a late afternoon session on AAC&U’s initiative, Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility.
We may not be able to do much to boost the nation out of the Great Recession, or boost our students’ pessimism about paying for college. But we may be able to carve out a place within the economic anxiety to exercise our own institutional and community values, and in so doing, encourage our students to do the same.
Laura Behling is the associate provost of faculty affairs and interdisciplinary programs at Butler University.
