Abstract
Our higher education system is broken. According to Sara Goldrick-Rab, roughly 75 percent of American families say college is unaffordable. In Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, Goldrick-Rab lays out the case for reimagining our financial aid system. Past approaches to educational inequality have only made symptomatic prescriptions. The disease, according to the author, is the current structure of the system itself, what she calls Financial Aid 1.0. The inability to properly diagnose the problem lies in the ways federal, state, and higher education entities view financial aid policies and the habits of those for whom aid programs are essential. One such symptomatic approach involves need-based grants awarded through private entities. To understand the effectiveness of private grants on educational outcomes, Goldrick-Rab developed the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Survey (WSLS), comprised of 3,000 randomly selected students enrolled in two- and four-year Wisconsin institutions who met the need-based grant criteria of the Fund for Wisconsin Scholars program. All students were enrolled full-time as first-semester freshmen in the fall of 2008. The author shows that despite these efforts, our most vulnerable students continue to experience hardships associated with the price of college. Rather than shift the burden from public to private interests, we must overhaul our current financial aid system.
Goldrick-Rab begins her discussion with a historical overview of the development of financial aid policies, beginning with the passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965 and the creation of the Pell Grant program in 1972. The reader is then introduced to federal- and state-level policies of the 1980s and 1990s that reduced higher education funding, facilitating the advent of robust and complex public and private student loan programs. The reader is then introduced to six WSLS research subjects who inform much of the subsequent qualitative analyses of the text through their experiences as FWS-eligible Pell recipients navigating the higher education system. Though these students come from very different contexts and pursue diverse degrees across several Wisconsin institutions, as low-income students, they share many of the same challenges that thematically structure the rest of the book. The author concludes with a robust set of prescriptions for fixing the problems of Financial Aid 1.0, a system that fails both low-income and middle-class families.
The most obvious strength of Goldrick-Rab’s text lies in its many remedies for the financial aid system, what she calls Financial Aid 2.0, predicated on the centrality of financial aid to student success. These remedies include making the first few years of public education or an initial degree free to all as a public good, focusing on the price of college attendance rather than limiting our consideration to the cost of tuition (e.g., food, housing, transportation, textbooks), and raising the federal threshold of zero-expected family financial contribution to $30,000. Empowering students to make better decisions about their educational choices and financial risk must also occur. This includes earlier interventions with high school students to better explain financial aid processes, clearly listing sources of aid and requirements for maintaining aid, including minimum GPA or enrollment requirements, and tuition rate guarantees. Fostering these student competencies requires retraining financial aid specialists with an integrated approach to helping students understand both internal and external aid opportunities. Finally, we should consider comparable programs to those already implemented to help students through K–12 education, including initiatives like the National School Lunch Program to combat food insecurity. All of these remedies require rearticulating higher education as a public good and an investment of resources for the betterment of society.
Despite its numerous strengths, I found myself wondering what happens to WSLS research participants like Chloe, Norbert, or Tyler, who decide to pursue advanced degrees. Graduate and professional student advocacy groups have criticized discussions of student debt that ignore the plights of heavily indebted graduate and professional students and advanced degree holders. Goldrick-Rab occasionally acknowledges the tribulations of these students, notably when she explains most six-figure debt results from pursuing graduate and professional education. Doing this group justice would require another book-length study, but a few explicit considerations of graduate and professional degree seekers may elucidate the continued disadvantage low-income students face when trying to further their educations and careers as well as provide empirical grounding to the later claim that graduate and professional education now functions as a gatekeeper of classist hierarchy, as baccalaureate degrees did several decades ago. Contributions to and effects of graduate and professional student debt is a topic ripe for academic inquiry. Hershbein and Hollenbeck’s (2005) edited volume, Student Loans and the Dynamics of Debt, to which Goldrick-Rab contributed, contains a chapter on the efficacy of income-based repayment plans for graduate and professional education. However, much of the extant higher education literature on this unique dimension of student debt lacks the qualitative, human element so refreshing in Goldrick-Rab’s text.
Nontraditional Pell recipients constitute another unrepresented group of degree seekers. Just as the “undergraduate experience” cannot be generalized across socioeconomic status, nor should the Pell experience be generalized across age groups. What unique challenges do older undergraduates face? Is there a substantive difference when nontraditional students claim themselves on a FAFSA, rather than as a dependent? The reader gets a brief window into some of these concerns through the experiences of Alicia, one of the research participants, whose education is complicated by instability in her daughter’s daycare arrangement. Unfortunately, this is only briefly considered. Alicia represents the important demographic of student-parents, but as a 20-year-old, the reader is still left wondering how older first-time and returning Pell-eligible undergraduates navigate the system. This absence reflects a limitation in research design as the Fund for Wisconsin Scholars, and therefore the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study, is limited to students under the age of 21.
Fundamentally reshaping the higher education system is a messy and complex undertaking. Goldrick-Rab offers many thought-provoking prescriptions for improvement. Though most of these remedies focus on financial aid, challenges faced by students throughout the book indicate many more shortcomings in multiple units of the modern academy. Much attention is given to the lack of communication, policy information, and knowledge of life situations among academic advisors. However, there is no mention of the increasing structural limitations and decreasing resources within academic advising centers at universities around the United States. At my university, it is not uncommon for advisors in large academic divisions to have 400 to 500 students. Having the time and resources to engage students beyond their current abilities, vital as it may be, is simply untenable in this arrangement. If change is going to occur as it should, fundamental restructuring needs to take place across academic and administrative units. These concerns represent less an unforgivable oversight and more a desire to foster additional considerations for Goldrick-Rab’s compelling analysis.
Thought-provoking and accessible, Goldrick-Rab’s text can be meaningfully incorporated in specialty courses in the sociology of education or social inequalities at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. However, its relatability also makes it an excellent choice for survey instructors who prefer monographs over textbooks. Utilizing individual narratives and large data sets to both qualitatively and quantitatively explicate the macro-institutional procedures and policies of the financial aid system forces students to reorient their analyses away from discourses of individual responsibility, cost-benefit assessment, and personal fault when considering the social problems of student matriculation, retention, and debt. Instructors should consider pairing this text with TRAILS resources available through the American Sociological Association. In one such resource, Annette Lareau (2014) has provided a thoughtful activity on stratification and college debt, which asks students to calculate repayment timelines across job types and debt levels. One of the many issues facing college students is a dearth of knowledge regarding loan repayment expectations upon graduation or incompletion, making this activity all the more prescient to an undergraduate classroom.
Irrespective its pedagogic utility, the challenges described throughout the text are invaluable for instructors, administrators, and students of higher education to better understand the lived experiences of Pell recipients at their respective institutions. Goldrick-Rab’s analysis also challenges generalizations of the “undergraduate experience” as one defined by relative affluence, leisure, and privilege. This monolithic view of university students clouds our ability to see student underperformance as the result of structural deficiencies, not simply financial mismanagement by undisciplined young adults. The author’s discussion of food insecurity among college students has already led to new and important works in the sociology of health. Subsequent discussions of her findings have led Goldrick-Rab to suggest a “Basic Needs Security” syllabus statement. Whether university educators implement this text, providing a syllabus statement about basic needs is a wonderful idea for any class.
I read this book with great interest as my institution, the University of Missouri, just announced the Missouri Land Grant Compact. This initiative, meant to serve low-income and working-class Missouri residents, covers the cost of tuition and fees not met by other grants and scholarships for full-time, Pell-eligible students seeking their first undergraduate degree. On paper, this sounds wonderful, but as the author points out, policymakers and university administrators miss key needs when attention is solely placed on the direct cost of tuition. Though additional resources are available to honors-eligible Pell-recipients, the standard package does not include those indirect costs that often compel low-income students to work while pursuing their degrees. As classist barriers to institutions of higher education erode, corresponding measures must be taken to avoid financial barriers to student success. The numerous remedies offered in this text, from the facile to the foundational, provide educators, administrators, and policymakers with the tools to make educational equity a reality for all students.