by Kerry Dougherty
I’m tired of bickering with millennials.
Every time the topic of student loan forgiveness comes up and I point out that it’s bad form to borrow money you can’t repay, they come at me:
College was so much cheaper when you went to school, they whine.
Indeed, it was.
You know what else was different during the Bare Bones Era of Education?
College itself.
I left for a small private school in rural Pennsylvania in the 1970s with bedding, clothes, a typewriter and a sack of quarters for the dorm laundry and pay phone.
My school didn’t offer dining “plans.” We had a dining hall. It served three edible meals a day during set hours. If you didn’t like what was on the menu or wanted something when the cafeteria was closed, there was a hamburger joint in the student union.
My college had a miniature bowling alley, a couple of racquetball courts and a pool.
Yet I remember unpacking in my dorm room, gazing out across the leafy campus and thinking how lucky I was to be there. After all, I was the first person in my family to go to college.
The four years I spent on those grounds were some of the happiest of my life.
When I started touring colleges with my teenagers in 2007, I was stunned. And not just by the price tag.
The entire college experience seemed focused on, well, over-the-top luxuries. There were coed dorms with colorful bowls of condoms in the lobbies. Most schools boasted stunning fitness centers, rock-climbing walls, food courts and sushi bars. One even had a water slide.
While tour guides touched on academics, the main focus often seemed to be on “amenities.”
College enrollment has been stagnant for several years, with a slight dip during Covid. As a result, colleges – even the Ivies – have embarked on what The New York Times once called an “amenities race” as they compete for kids.
Sadly, offering excellent academics isn’t enough. Schools are enticing teenagers with Kardashian-like leisure activities.
If you haven’t visited a campus lately, a trip around the Internet will give you a taste of what’s out there: lazy rivers with waterfalls, tanning booths, trampoline centers, indoor beaches with waterside wait staff, spas, boxing studios, massage centers, golf simulators, juice bars, saunas, 25-person hot tubs and infinity pools.
Oh, and some dorms at elite schools are beginning to offer maid and concierge services, whirlpool spas, fireplaces, walk-in closets, private baths and rooftop patios.
One college reportedly has an ice cream truck on campus with free ice cream. Another periodically brings in a Ferris wheel.
It’s dazzling. Truth is, if I were choosing a college today, I’d go for one with an indoor beach over one without.
But these extras are part of what’s driving up the cost of college. In an interview with U.S. News & World Report several years ago, Robert Reich, the former Clinton administration labor secretary, singled out two areas of “university overspending” that account for spiraling tuition: bloated administrations and fripperies, which he said, are making colleges “resemble country clubs.”
“Those amenities are extremely expensive and contribute to the escalating cost of college,” he said. “Moreover, they have very little to do with the education of most young people.”
I paid my own way through college with a summer waitressing job, work-study jobs at school, a year as an RA and loans. Oh, and I dropped out after my sophomore year to earn money to go back.
When I graduated, I owed $4,000.
My first weekly paycheck at a large daily newspaper was $177 a week. That was an annual salary of $9,204.
If my calculations are right – I majored in political science, not math – that student loan, which I repaid, represented 43% of my gross earnings.
Yes, I realize many students are more heavily in debt now. So are people with car payments and large home mortgages. You don’t see them asking taxpayers to bail them out.
Politicians and parents have been howling about the cost of college for years. But kids who gripe about student debt while whizzing down a campus water slide seem to have no notion of how things work.
Neither do politicians who shamelessly pander to young voters by promising to forgive student loans instead of calling on colleges to cut costs.
Take U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for instance. She’s been on Twitter this week badgering the president to erase student loans. I’d like to remind Warren that she once pulled down $400,000 a year to teach a single class at Harvard.
Warren and other overpaid faculty members and administrators drove up the cost of higher education.
Yet they never call for cutting salaries or jobs as a way to hold down tuition. The only solution their highly educated minds can find is to force taxpayers to pick up the tab for student loans.
Any plan for massive college loan forgiveness would mean that America’s waitresses and welders and the rest of us would be forced to underwrite the cost of college kids bobbing along on lazy rivers.
That idea won’t float.
This column has been republished with permission from Kerry: Unemployed & Unedited.
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