By Tom

My son and I just returned from a weekend-long college
visit. We went to the University of North Texas, which apparently has one the
best music schools in the country. (My son is an aspiring jazz musician.) It
was a fascinating experience, in which I learned three important things about
college.

First of all, college is expensive—really expensive. You
already knew that, but when it’s your money and your son’s education, you get
to learn it all over again. When I was in school, I thought college was expensive.
And it was. But when I was at the UW in the early ‘80s, college cost about a
thousand dollars a year; it was completely feasible to work my way through with
a decent summer job. Now, tuition costs over ten times that much, and it
actually makes more financial sense for our son to focus on school and try for
an academic scholarship than to work part-time to save money for college.

Secondly, there are other reasons why college costs so much.
Of course, the obvious reason is that states
are under-funding higher
education. When I was in school, we paid 30% of the cost of in-state tuition;
the state paid for the rest. Nowadays, those numbers have reversed. But there’s
another reason for the steep price hike: college today is not the Spartan
experience it used to be. Yes, the dorm rooms are still small, and there’s still
another guy in there with you, but today’s students have access to a top-notch
health club (North Texas’ features a huge climbing wall) free wifi, state-of-the-art
computer centers, high-tech libraries, and food choices that we only dreamed
of. The college we visited even offers pet therapy to treat home-sickness, a
masseuse, and a tutoring center where students have free access to editing
services. That’s right; free editing services. You can actually write a crappy
paper and have college staff help you fix it up before you turn it in. Our tour
guide claimed that the service “boosted scores by at least a grade.” So yeah,
college costs a lot more. But it looks like some of that cost is going toward
questionable services designed to attract marginal students who then have to
borrow money to pay for an education that may or may not even help them earn
the money they need to pay it back.

Finally, I learned that getting a kid from high school into
college is extremely complicated. Part of it, of course, has to do with the
cost. For most families, going to college entails some sort of financial aid,
be it scholarships or loans. In fact, one reason we were down there has to do with
the fact that the Great State of Texas has a law that grants in-state tuition
to every student who wins a competitive scholarship of $1000 or more. We’ve
done the math, and it would actually be cheaper to have him in North Texas than
Central Washington. Go figure. Seriously, go figure, because you’ll be doing a
lot of complicated figuring when your kid turns 17. I’ve worked in education
for thirty years and I’m daunted by the procedures, the paperwork and the
deadlines. I can only imagine how it must seem to a struggling family of recent
immigrants trying to get their oldest kid into college.

But don’t get me wrong. Despite the cost and confusion and
inevitable heartache when he finally moves into that over-priced, needlessly
cushy dorm room, it will be one of the proudest moments of my life. But not
just my life. As teachers, we play a long, patient game. I take fourth graders
and turn them into fifth graders, so that their fifth grade teachers can get
them ready for sixth grade, and so on. We worry a lot about the kids who don’t
make it, but the fact is that many kids do—and we need to celebrate that.

I just wish it didn’t cost much.    `