Me and my special someone went out to dinner last nite with some friends. (Incidentally, the place we went is the best mexican food we’ve had here, on a par with places in Chicago (not quite as cheap though). Angelica had called me a while back, been like “so I’m by this resale store down at Nicollet and 35th and there’s a mexican place here that looks good, let’s go out to eat” and I was all “that’s pretty far to go … but okay, I guess.” Just like with the International Espionage! show, she was right and I was wrong. Great eats. Anyhow, dinner last nite…)
Dinner was good, so was the conversation (naturally, I mean, I was there). Walking back together en route to a bar, we got on the topic of degree completion times. A friend told me once that the place I’m at now average like 6 or 7 years for undergrads to get their degrees. One of the friends we were out with said that when she was doing her undergrad (she finished a year or two ago) at a U in California some adviser person told her it was unrealistic to finish in 4 years. She was like “I’m nearly 30, I’m getting married, my husband’s not going to be living in CA anymore, I need to done and get out” and so pushed her way into a class she needed in order to graduate but wasn’t going to be able to take that year. All of this strikes me as ridiculous, given that students are paying big money for tuition, getting loans that can’t even be bankruptcied out of. I looked and this report published in 2003 states that people completing undergrad degrees in 1999-2000 took nearly six years on average to complete. If people are just taking their time then more power to them. But if people are stuck, that’s crap. The report also indicates that the more institutions a student attends the longer it takes to finish, like folk who do a 2yr degree then move a 4yr place to finish up the degree, said finishing often takes more than just the 2yr difference. Of course, these are generally people with less money. This indicates that in the early 90s degree completion time went up, as did student loan amounts. Again, if folk are using this do what they want, awesome. If not, not. Personally, I think institutions should make commitments to students being able to finish in 4 yrs if they like, full stop. Insofar as the degree is a piece of paper for job markets’ sake, keeping students in to pay more tuition is out of order and does no one any favors, except university administrators perhaps. I could see an argument about giving students substantive quality education, not shortchanging them, etc etc, but that seems to me to be a crap reason (that is, a meritocratic ideology) for barriers to faster completion schedules (I should say, “barriers to the option of faster completion schedules”). Let students who want to stay stay, and those who want to finish faster finish faster.
I wish I was better with numbers and all that, I’d love to have info on over all durations of degree completion across the U.S. etc. (See this as well.)
You can’t bankruptcy out of your student loans? I have to say the US student loan situation is horrifying, even the bankruptcy thing aside. It’s bad enough in NZ where my undergrad one was incurred (a little better in Australia since you don’t even have to start paying until you are earning a decent income and there is no interest, I think). But in the US these are bank loans right? And you start paying a set amount right after you graduate?
hi Mike,
The gov’t makes loans to students through the Dept of Education, those ones are not get-riddable unless you pay them off. They are somewhat forgiving and flexible about making payments (better than credit card companies anyway), but that’s only a short term measure. There are different repayment plans etc, so the amount paid per payment varies not just based on total loan amounts. Some loans are no interest while in university, others are with interest during university, all are with interest after university. With both, you get six months of no payments needing to be made (“grace period”) once, when you leave university. There are also private educational loans, which are like any other private loan I believe. (I don’t have those, I’ve only done the ones from the gov’t.) I finished my undergrad in 2000 with 23 grand in loan debt. College doesn’t feel like it was a particularly smart choice for me, judged just in terms of money. There’s more to life than money of course, but yeah, the money part of higher education in the US is really messed up.
take care,
Nate
Mike, I’m not sure of the exact situation now since I’m not studying and no longer employed to know these things, but I’m pretty sure debt from fees only goes up by CPI. Other student debts were incurred when people took out loans under the scheme that partially replaced Austudy after 1992 – i.e. the scheme which allowed you to increase somewhat the pitiful allowance supposed to mean you could eat and pay rent, but not only did you have to pay back the increase, you had to pay back twice the increase. Eg. if you increased you Austudy income from one hundred and fifty dollars a week to two hundred dollars a week, you would have to pay back one hundred dollars for every week in which you received the extra fifty. This was under the ALP, which invented this “pay back when you earn over x amount” user-pays strategy as a way to get revenue while not immediately and massively restricting access on the basis on available cash. This “deferred repayment” idea applied to both fees (HECS charges) and Austudy loan replacement. The ALP then kept increasing the fees and decreasing the amount one had to earn before one started giving a chunk of one’s income to the govt, to the point where you basically had to start paying back your debt if you worked at a supermarket checkout a few nights a week. When the Liberal Party got in and built on the ALP’s neoliberalising agenda, fees got so high that I think they had to put the point of repayment up a bit more – the proportion of people working while studying had massively increased as a consequence of the agenda of which these policies were one part, so that repayment for more people would have begun immediately and thus presented, again, a more immediate barrier to access. From memory. But now you can also buy your way into courses if you don’t get in through your high school marks per se and have, eg. one hundred and fifty thousand dollars lying around for a medical degree. The massive differences in high school year twelve marks between kids from the working class and/or state schools on the one hand, and kids growing up with wealth and private schooling on the other, make high school scores more-or-less a ratification of privilege anyway, which is why the student Left is probably wrong to see this Liberal Party policy as a scheme to drive out poor kids: it is more likely just a scheme to get immediate buckets of cash. The private school and privileged domination of medicine and law, and generally of entrance to ‘elite’ universities, was already pretty safe.
(I’m actually a bit hazy on the later history of re-payment increments so don’t quote me on the dynamic of any increase in repayment threshold. It isn’t just an urban legend: too many drugs really do screw with the memory.)
The ‘student movement’ in Australia had a pretty inadequate analysis of the introduction of fees in the eighties and nineties, when the ALP was leading the neoliberal charge – focussing on fees as a barrier to access even as the ALP was expanding the post-secondary ed. system, rather than analysing the overall shift in revenue streams and creation of massive debt as capitalist strategies to reconstitute the state and economy, attacking certain entrenched social positions, undermining certain forms of actual or potential resistance, and most importantly re-imposing work. Successfully.
Oh yeah, I’m talking about Australia by the way.
Hey Benjamin,
Thanks for that info… In NZ you get charged CPI plus interest, and the repayment threshold is about $16,000. But it’s the same kind of system. Actually now, if you continue to live in New Zealand I think you no longer have to pay interest, but that’s not much use to me. I came to Australia mainly for the Sydney Uni Political Economy Dept, but it was only possible because research students are not charged fees over here. In fact for just about any NZer doing just about anything, the easiest way to boost your standard of living is to spend $350 on a one-way ticket to Aus. That’s why something like 10% of the NZ population now lives over here, and I guess a bg reason why the government uses the student loan scheme to blackmail people into coming back!
I’ve got to say though that the secondary school system over here seems absolutely fucked! It is segregated by wealth to a shocking degree, and that also flows into the university system, not least here at Sydney Uni.
hi Mike, Ben,
What’s CPI? And Benjamin, you write “the pitiful allowance supposed to mean you could eat and pay rent” does this mean that students get/got paid to attend uni? Does this still happen? What strings are attached? In the U.S. there’s no student allowances like this for undergraduates (which is why its very common for students to have jobs, at least where I’m at – a big public U – pretty much all the students have jobs, the rates of students holding jobs may be lower at smaller more expensive universities – if so it’s because students are getting money from their families – but it’s still pretty high at those places too). Allowance like funding does exist for graduate students. The norm at least a public universities for graduate students is that graduate students teach in exchange for tuition waiver plus wages (expectation in my department is an average of 20 hours a week). That’s the stuff that graduate students have unionized over, or tried to. It’s possible to get other funding to where all one is required to do is be a graduate student. Some departments have this as the norm (everyone gets some stretch of this whether a summer or a semester or a year or whatever) but more often these are gotten via departmental or university-wide things that people compete for.
take care,
Nate
Hey Nate, CPI=consumer price index, basically an annual calculation of inflation.
Austudy is a welfare-like living allowance for students that isn’t quite enough to live in most cases, and that has also become available to fewer people. Hence most students in Australia now also have jobs, though this wasn’t true only a few years ago. There are a variety of economies like those you describe in universities, though not operating in exactly the same ways. Simon Marginson has written some things that are not too bad describing this, though I don’t know of anything very recet or very comprehensive. And the labor markets involved are actually one of the weak points of his book on markets and education: do you know it?
Thanks Benjamin. I don’t know Marginson’s work. What’s the book called?
Simon’s book was called “Markets in Education” and didn’t seem to make much of a splash, which I think he found a little disappointing since it was a pretty serious effort to sum up over twenty years of research into education. I think Glenn Rikowski has also done interesting work on education (see hereand here.)