Guest this particular study came out of a longstanding set of research of mine on why some people finish college and other people dont. I have been interested in that question for most of my career, one of the things that experts have said matters to how students do in college is money. But when they examined the effects of financial a program they dont find very much. For some reason the effects of Financial Aid like when measured with official a statistics they dont like to be that large. In 2008i was approached by a philanthropist who said we are going to do something incredibly generous. We are going to give out money to students across wisconsin and it will help them finish college. I really wonder, will that work . Really, because there has been other studies that indicate that its a drop in the bucket. Will it make the difference they hope sp1 you know what you did differently, many many books i read will take a snapshot. This is the graduating cohort. And they dont look at what happens in between. You did something very different. Guest in order to understand how the Program Works i felt like getting Financial Aid is an evolving experience. The price that you pay for the first year of college is not the same price you pay for the second year. Bring the people know that. It doesnt take experts to tell them that. That meant that what we did was follow the same group of students over the next six years to see how their lives changed and the extent to which their resources and how the program affected the resources how that shifted. We got to see dynamics unfold that i do think are commonly missed. I think you are about to see nuances. That is something something that gets missed when youre doing snapshots. You move all of the in betweens. Most people, when they talk about the cost of college think of tuition and fees. That is what they think of. Your book elaborates on what the true cost of college is. Can you tell me a little about what it is and the audience about what it really takes to go to college and what a truly cost. Guest it is far more than tuition and fees. The federal government knows that. And what it listens the cost of attending it includes things like getting a roof over roof over your head, having food to eat and transportation. Again the conversation keeps going back to tuition and fees. Thats unfortunate. Tuition and fees are less than half, sometimes only only 30 of the total cost of attending college. The real hangup that students have are the need to pay their rent. To pay their utility. To buy food. They cant do those things in the same way when they are in college because they need to spend time in the classroom. It is those kinds of things that trip them up over time. It wasnt the tuition and fees. That is when for example they would end up taking out a loan. It wasnt to pay the tuition, it was it was to pay the cost of living while going to school. Host i think those are the things that people fail to appreciate. I work at a Large University and it is not uncommon for me to speak to students and have students who truly worry about things like can i pay my metro card which enables them to get to work, to school, back home. Verses, can i eat lunch this week. They are they are not just hanging out having fun. Talk a little bit about some narratives, what you did was you instilled them in some students individual experiences and can you talk a little bit about that in terms of what the students were struggling with on a daily basis . The. Guest there all 3000 students in the study. The book focuses on six of them to help the reader understand what it looks like up close. These students have gone through norms challenges. I want the reader to be able to see them. Consider someone like chloe. Chloe was a young woman who grew up on a form in rural wisconsin. She had a horse and thought, it would be cool when im older to be able to take care of animals. Which i think is a normal ambition. She went off to a twoyear college so she could do that. While many people think that Community Colleges free in this country, chloe was one who quickly figured out that was not true. So she had very little money, her family was assessed by the federal government to pay only a couple thousand dollars per year for college. That is after her grants came due. She was facing a bill over 10,000 dollars per year. She was asking herself how am i supposed to do that . Just because the federal government says my mom can contribute that 2000 dollars, she cant, they are wrong. So chloe sold cant, they are wrong. So chloe sold her horse to go to college. Host to me that was such appointment example of the extreme that students will go to because they want that education guest she did want to. I dont think she is alone. I. I think sometimes what happens is grandmas sell something or the cousins pitching something. Families go to Great Lengths to make College Possible. Even. Even with that money she was not okay. She knew about Student Loans but wanted to avoid them because her mother was struggling with a lot of credit card debt. Chloe was afraid of ending in that circumstance. Instead, she she took on that one job, but two. The reason was because she cannot get get enough hours from a single employer. She worked at kohls, a Department Store store in wisconsin. She also worked at pet smart which makes a lot of sense for what she was trying to do in school. She found herself doing those jobs and doing what so many people told her to do which is to take five classes at a time to get done quickly. Two jobs, five classes do not add up. She was commuting back and forth, running all over the place and she started to find yourself falling asleep in class. Again, she knew she was exerting too much energy and she was not doing enough studying. By the time she said this is not going to work for me and i need other money and she applied for student loan, Student Loans dont just come through immediately. It took more than one month for the loan money to arrive. By that time her grades were so bad she had been placed on academic probation and these days she is no longer in college. She has it debt and no degree. Host that is what worries me about students. We talk about the American Dream and you talk about it being broken for a group of students. A student like chloe comes in, she is working two jobs, shes doing the best she can, she is trying to contribute at home. Theres also so much shame involved in going to a faculty member, teacher and say, on struggling, what can i do . I have seen students fall off before when it may be in october they started to try to find some help or lifelike the group through the cysto. But it overwhelms them quickly. Then when we then when we think about what is out there, you get minimum wage jobs if you dont have a college degree. As you know from the book, chloe joined the navy. That was another astounding thing. Talk a little bit about what our preconceived notion is of the College Experience and how chloes lens was different. Guest when i went to see her after she dropped out, i had to fly to florida from wisconsin to meet her. I did that because when a student drops out of college that us last time we see them. I wanted to sit down with her and see what was going on. What was clear is that she was having trouble finding work, work that would pay. Being in the navy, for her, created a sense of structure and gave her a sense that she could at least get, she put it three square meals a day, a roof over her head, while she was trying to pursue her career. That it didnt mean however that she did not want to be in college. She just knew. She just knew the College Experience she had did not seem to care, frankly the school didnt seem to care that she was falling short in other areas. So while we talk about 18 euros and thats what she was, they want all of this freedom and to go off and have nobody tell them what to do. I dont think they are actually asking to be completely cut loose and shoved off a cliff and settled with an Economic Situation that puts them at such risk. We are telling them to go to school and then saddling them in this way. It really does feel like a betrayal. Thats why i put that in the title, we have broken their trust. Host i think that strikes a cord with me all of the time. A lot of of public universities are also on resource, or in equitably resourced. If you go to a more elite school, the ratio ratio of advisers to students is much better than if you have an advisor and trying to advise seven or 800 students. And the students have many problems. Can i ask you, little digression, little digression, talk about your own story. You worked through college, right . Guest yes. I went to an institution where my mother was an adjunct. So for some reason those were the good old days and that meant that i got free tuition at that institution, which is amazing. That is a big discount. But my parent did not have College Savings but in no way did their two incomes didnt qualify for a period so i decided that i would just work. I was lucky enough that working at the restaurant allowed me to pocket enough tips and i was decent enough as a waitress that i could make ends meet by working about 40 hours per week. Sometimes i was cocktail he then other times i was doing burgers are pancakes, or do you want sera but that. I was able to do that. The prices and cost of living today are so much higher in the minimum wage is so sad and frankly the tip minimum wage has gone down. Partly because you put tips on a credit card so you have to pay taxes. But these things no longer add up. While i worked in college and you may have two, that is not going to be a sustainable story. Host i think that is an important point to make. So many people say i worked through with no problems. But the world is not the same. The cost of rising education, the cost of tuition, we have a very reasonably priced tuition and even some of our students struggle. But at a lot of other publics, the tax have been lifted on tuition. Their tuitions look more like private tuition. When you talked about first is the first year tuition. The financially package comes in and you say great. What happens the second year typically . Is. Is so many schools are giving students extra grant tape for the first year of college to get them to come to school. The family finds out in the second year that grant is not available. Intuition went up. So over time, the colleges become more expensive with each year you stay. Students are really taken aback by that. Theres one thing that people need to know going in is that what you are given is that first year of College Price tag is not going to be what youre going to pay in the fourth year. Host one of the other misconceptions is the fact that the perception is out there that students, they they are spending their Financial Aid dollars on fancy restaurants, going to bars, any kind of luxury that you can imagine and so therefore, you are not really spending where it is meant to be. I want to read a quote, because it really struck me, the quote about buying black pants. Which is something you and i, and you have young children, i have grown children and Everybody Knows they need an interview suit, so i just wanted to quote this and have you expand a little bit on it. The quotas, i dont spend it on luxury items. I dont buy stuff that i just want. I actually never. I actually never really have unless theres a need for it. Three weeks ago i went and got myself some nice black pants, which you need for College Business for interviews. It is my only pair of black pants and i got a nice button up sheep because you need to look nice for interviews. Other than that, it is just, dues for the sorority and if i need things for class or college. I try not to go out by food too much. I dont spend a lot on food. But i do buy some applesauce and milk, just breakfast items. I do have snack atoms, hot chocolate, but thats just it. I can get by without buying luxury items. Hot chocolate was a luxury item for this woman. Guest people with few resources which is who these Financial Aid recipients are have one for long time how to manage scarce resources. They dont throw things away. There so many things been said about College Students that might apply to some people but they mainly apply to people whose parents are paying for college. Who are at ely, elite, private institutions would have the luxury of going to the art museum or having a party are going on a spring break. The vast majority of todays undergraduates dont do any of those things. The data that is being used to paint that picture of these other folks has nothing to do with the data on the Financial Aid recipients. They dont line up. We do not see students spending things in frivolous ways. We asked, we did budget logs with them, we know what they spent their time on. There are two things that were notable to me, one thing that is never asked about in studies of undergraduates is the time you spend studying. They never ask it you do you spend time taking care of other people. We saw lots of people making that kind of time investment. Even if they were not working at a paid job, they, they were working, caring for someone else. That was such an important thing. The other thing that we saw was far from being out partying or drinking with the money, they are trying to help their families with it. So they were back home trying to make sure that moms bills were being paid, trying to make sure that younger brothers and sisters were okay. These were not 30yearolds taken taking care of their own children. These were 18 yearolds taking care of the families that help them get to college in the first place. And that to me is another very important point. Because what you see is an expected family contribution. Talk a little bit about the negative financial contribution. I see it all of the time at city college where i am. I see students that are paying for helping their grandparents, paying for medical costs, really using any money they have to try to get back. They are not getting financial contribution from the parents because quite frankly, they cannot afford it. Guest thats right. The term expected family contribution is in it official term that is presumptuous. The number number it reaches is a fake number. First, it doesnt take into account one of the most important things in the familys financial resources, their debt. It might decide that a family can contribute ask, but it is completely ignoring the debt that family possessions that may prevent them from doing so. In addition, lots of people are working in high school these days to help their families. When they go to college, even if it is down the street but they have to spend time at college, the family loses that income. That is how we can sometimes reach a negative effective family contribution. The problem is no negative numbers are allowed in the federal system. So they put the number is zero and say you dont have to contribute anything but they dont say lets give money back to the family. Which is in fact what the students are doing with the resources. Its really a pretend figure, so many people put in the statistical model and say it doesnt matter much when we are predicting college completion. Well, that is because it is a fake fake number. It is inaccurate. A measurement error is a big deal, this is it a number plagued with measurement air. Thats disturbing disturbing because its vague, its a bureaucratic system. Tell me a little bit about that. That is the think the other students come in and they say fast for is easy to fill out. I think you need a phd to fill it up quite frankly, but talk about the bureaucratic nature of the whole package when the student begins. Guest its a small american bureaucratic tragedy. This thing is a mess. There is a lot of attention for policymakers right now in dealing with the past five. Im concerned about what happens after the pass by. As students know, after the pass for you find out youre not getting enough money and then you also find out these extra rules. So to actually to keep your money from yeartoyear you have to do a bunch of things. One is that even if you stay at the same school you have to keep refiling the fafsa every year. Even if nothing has changed. Thats not thats not easy because of the paperwork involved. You also have to keep up with satisfactory academic progress. If we could simply explain what that wasnt help students to it that would be great. Every Single School has different rules for that. What it means is the students have to get certain grades but they also have to complete a certain number of courses. If you go back to your own experiences in school, when a class didnt turn out to be the way you thought it would be a nose too hard, are not what you are looking for where the professor was terrible, you dropped it. If youre trying to get your grades up you took the easier classes too. The strategies will backfire if you are on financially. So people doing regular things that most people do in college, it will actually cause them to lose their Financial Aid and not surprisingly, they are taken aback. Host and at city college where trying to tell students that if you drop this course you drop a lower level, if you drop a lower lower level your financially goes away. And sometimes they dont have a choice because, do i get enough . Or a d when i have a dream to become something that an effort do not course one hell. Tell me about how some of your in this longitudinal study dealt with those issues. Guest they dealt with them pretty badly. Even as a faculty member who students now know that i know know some of this stuff and i know this goes on, so they bring me their cases and Say Something like my dad got sick and i missed school and i miss that class a lot. Im aware of the potential consequences and so we weigh them. I can help help them navigate this. These things dont make sense. You should be able to drop a class if you need to without it hurting you too much. So we saw students who literally dropped below a fulltime status and all of a sudden, parttime pays half of what fulltime pays but they are Living Expenses are not half. So the formula for distributing the money is off base. What it usually did was cause them overtime to move slower through college. That is the last thing you want to see. The