Nia Mirza, an international student from Pakistan, organized a petition earlier this year demanding NYU lower the cost of attendance after the annual price tag of attending the school suddenly rose from $64,000 to $71,000.
“We’ve already had a lot of states use student debt relief as a carrot to entering certain professions,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “Now that most professions have student debtors in them you’re going to see broad-based relief plans,” like New York’s, he said.
New York’s is it’s linked specifically to income, so anyone making a relatively low salary — whether it’s an artist working out of a loft space in Bushwick or a nonprofit researcher toiling away in midtown — qualifies.
The fourth quarter of the Obama presidency has been relatively active when it comes to higher education. Last year alone, the Administration announced a proposal to make two years of community college tuition-free, finalized and released a treasure trove of data on earnings and loan repayment data by college as a substitute for its once-vaunted plans for a College Ratings system, came out with a Student Aid Bill of Rights, and issued regulations intended to streamline the confusing set of student loan repayment options.
While that may not be the goal in Tennessee, there is evidence that tuition freezes do lead to other cuts in higher education. One only needs to look to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker for evidence, says Mark Huelsman, senior policy analyst at Demos, a public policy think tank. “Scott Walker froze tuition for in-state students, but he decimated student support and faculty support,” says Huelsman.
European countries also differ substantively from the US in terms of the percentage of college attendees that their debt free models serve.
"Germany has a lower percentage of students go on to college than we have here in the US," Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at think tank Demos, told ATTN.
The vast riches of schools like Stanford and Harvard have created dilemmas about how their endowments should be directed. One slate of candidates for Harvard's board of overseers is calling for the school to spend some of its $37.6 billion endowment to cover tuition for all students. Lawmakers have also mulled requiring colleges with at least $1 billion in their endowments to spend at least one-quarter of the endowment's income on financial aid.
The Bennett Hypothesis likely explains tuition increases at some colleges, particularly for-profit universities, which are trying to maximize revenue, and graduate programs for which students can take out federal loans up to the cost of the program, said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. But not every type of higher education institution responds to increases in aid in the same way, he said.
As a result of having limited savings or other assets to cover the cost of college, African American families borrow heavily to pay for it. Researchers at the liberal think tank Demos found 4 out of 5 black graduates take out loans to attend public colleges, compared with less than two-thirds of whites.
African American students who borrow come out with more debt than their peers, often facing dismal job prospects. College-educated blacks have twice the unemployment rate of their white counterparts.
While students could always use more information about their loans and the cost of college, focusing too heavily on financial literacy as a route to curbing student debt “overcomplicates the discussion,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. College graduates are struggling with debt in large part because it simply costs a lot more to go to college these days, a fact of life students can’t get around even if they’re armed with more information, he said.
