Sarah goldrickrab discusses her book, paying the price on the rising cost of Higher Education. Good afternoon, sara, how are you today . Im good. Thank you for having me here. I loved your book, so chockful of important data and very complex data about the implications of Financial Aid and income in being able graduate college. It was so readable. Can i have a quote. This book is intended to be a wakeup call. It brings the lives of students pursuing College Degrees front and center and unveils their financial struggles. Ensuring that the American Public has a clear sense of how and why Financial Aid is failing to get students to graduation and this will help us find effective some issues. What drove you to do this study . Well, this particular study really came out of a longstanding set of research of mine why some people finish college and other people dont. Ive been interested in that question for much of my career. And one of the things that experts have said matters for how students do in college is money. But at the same time, whenever theyve examined the effects of Financial Aid program they dont find much. For some reasons, the Financial Aid, when pressuring statistics, they dont look to be that large. And in 2008 i was approached by a set of philanthropists who said were going to do something incredibly generous and were going to give out money to students across wisconsin and we hope it will help them finish college and i really wondered, will that work . Will it . Because there have been all of these other studies that kind of indicate, its a drop in the bucket and will it make the difference that they hope . A lot of books will take a snapshot. This is the entry cohort and this is the graduating cohort and they dont look at what happens in between. You did something very different. Talk about the longitudal nature of the study. In order to say how the program worked, i really felt like the experience of getting this program and getting Financial Aid is an evolving experience, right . The price that you say for the first year of college is not the same price you pay for the second year of college and frankly, regular people know that. So it doesnt take experts to tell them that. So that meant what we did, we followed the same group of students over the next six years, to see how their lives changed and the extent to which their need for resources and the way they use those resources and how this program affected those resources, how that shifted. And we got to see dynamics unfold, that i do think that are commonly missed. I think you got to see nuances and thats something that gets missed when youre just doing snapshots and snapshots because you lose all the in betweens. Most people when they talk about the cost of college, think of tuition and fees. Thats 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 through college and what it truly costs . Well, yeah, its far more tuition, and frankly, the federal government knows that. What it costs in the list of the institution, includes things like getting a roof over your head and food to eat and transportation. Again, the conversation keeps coming back to tuition and fees. Thats unfortunate because tuition and fees are less than half and sometimes maybe only 30 of the total cost of attending college. The real hangups that students have are the need to pay their rent, to pay their utilities torques to buy food. They cant do the same things when theyre in college because they need to spend time in the classrooms. It was those things that tripped them up over time, it wasnt the tuition and fees. Thats when, for example, they ended up taking out a loan. It wasnt to pay for the tuition, it was to pay the cost of living while going to school. I think those are the kinds of things that people fail to appreciate sometimes. I work in a very large public urban university, City University of new york system, and its not uncommon for me to speak to students and have students who truly worry about things like can i pay my metro card, which in fact enables them to get to work, to school, back home . Versus can i eat lunch this week . Theyre not just hanging out, having fun. And your talk a little about some of the narratives. What you did, you distilled them into some student individual experiences and can you talk a little about that in terms of what the students were struggling with on a daily basis . Sure, well, there are 3000 students in the overall study. The book focuses on six of them just to try to help the reader understand what this looks like up close and that was really one of my paths. These students have gone through enormous challenges and i want the reader to really see them. So consider someone like chloe. Chloe was a young woman who grew up on a farm, you know, in rural wisconsin and had a horse and thought, you it would be really cool when im older to be able to take care of animals which i think is pretty normal ambition. She went off to a twoyear college so she could do that. Well, so many people think that Community College is free in this country. Chloe was one of those who quickly figured out that that was not true. So, she had very little money, her family was assessed by the federal government to be able to pay only a couple thousand a year for college, but even after all her grants came due, she was facing a bill of over 10,000 a year. And she was asking herself, how am i supposed to do that . And by the way, just because the government says my mom can contribute that 2,000, she cant. Theyre wrong. So, chloe sold her horse to go to college. That was the starting point. To me that was such a poignant example of the extremes that students will go to because they want that education. She really did want it and i dont think that shes an anomaly. I think that sometimes what happens is grandma sells something or the cousins pitch in something. Families go to Great Lengths to make College Possible for students these days. Even with that money, she wasnt okay. She wanted to avoid Student Loans because her mother was struggling with Credit Card Debt and chloe was afraid of that circumstance. Instead she took on know the one job, but two jobs. The reason she couldnt get enough hours from a single employer. So she worked at kohls, which is a Department Store in wisconsin and she also worked at petsmart which made sense for what she was trying to do in school and found herself doing two jobs and doing what so many tell her to do, take five classes at a time to get done quickly. Two jobs and five classes do not add up. She was commuting back and forth running all over the place and falling asleep in class and again, she knew she was exerting too much energy and she wasnt doing enough studying. By the time she said, okay, this isnt going to work for me and i needed other money and applied for a student loan. Well, Student Loans dont just come through immediately. Right. It took more than a month for the loan money to arrive, and that point her grades were so bad she had been placed on academic probation and these days chloe is no longer in college. She has debt and no degree. And thats whats so worries me about students. We talk about the american dream, and you talk a little about it being broken for a group of students. But a student like chloe comes in, shes working two jobs, shes doing the best she can, shes trying to contribute at home. And theres also so much shame involved in going to a faculty member or a teacher and saying, im struggling, what can i do . And ive seen students fall off cliffs before when its maybe in october, they started to try to find some help or lifeline that could move through the system, but it over whems them so quickly and then when we think about what is out there, you get minimum wage jobs, if you dont dont have a College Degree and as you know from the book, chloe joined the navy, and that was another astounding thing. Talk a little about what our preconceived notion is of the College Experience and how chloes lens was different. Yeah, when i went to go see her after she had dropped out and frankly, i had to fly to florida from wisconsin to meet her anddy that because in so many cases when a student drops out of college, thats the last time we see them. I wanted to sit down with her and see whats going on. What was clear, she was having trouble finding work that would pay and that being in the navy, for her, created a sense of structure and gave her a sense that she could at least get, if she put three squares meals a day and a roof over her head while she was trying to pursue her career. That doesnt mean she doesnt want to be in college, but she knew that the College Experience she had didnt seem to care, the school didnt seem to care she was falling short in other areas. So i think when we talk about, you know, 18yearolds, and thats what she was, wanting all of this freedom and to go off and have nobody tell them what to do, i dont think that theyre actually asking to be completely cut loose and shoved off a cliff and saddled with an Economic Situation that puts them at such risk. Were telling them to go to school and saddle them in this way that it really does feel like a betrayal and thats why ive put that in the title. Weve broken their trust. I think thats something that strikes a chord with me all the time, because a lot of public universities are also unresourced or inequitably resourced. If you go to a more elite school, the ratio of advisors to students is much better than with 7, 800 students and the students have a myriad of problems. Can i ask you just a little d diegregs. I went to a situation where my mother was an adjunct and for some reason, those were the good old days and that meant i got free tuition at that institution. Pretty amazing. Which is amazing, and thats a big discount. My parents didnt have a lot of college savings. But two incomes we didnt qualify for aid. Lets be honest. We didnt qualify for aid and i decided i would just work. I was lucky enough working at a restaurant allowed me to pocket enough tips, and i was decent enough as a waitress, that i could make ends meet by working 40 hours a week and sometimes i was cocktailing and other times, burgers and pancakes, do you want syrup with that . But i was able to do that. The prices and the cost of living today are so much higher and the minimum wage is so sad and frankly, the tip minimum wage has even gone down partly because you put tips on a credit card so you have to pay taxes, and these things no longer add up. While i worked in college and you may have, too. Yeah. Thats not going to be the sustainable story here. And i think thats an important point to make cause so many people say i worked through, with no problem. But the world is not the same. The cost of rising education, costs of tuition. Now, were reasonably priced tuition and even many of our students struggle, but at a lot of other public, the taxes on tuitions so the tuitions look more like private tuitions and what you talked about first was that first year tuition, so the Financial Aid package comes in and you go, great. What happens the second year, typically . So many schools are giving students extra grant aid for the first year of college to get them to come to the school and the family finds out in the second year, that grants not available. And tuition went up. And so, over time, the college basically becomes more expensive with each year that you stay, and students are really taken aback by that and thats one thing that folks need to know going in, what youre given is that First Year College price tag is not going to be what you pay in that fourth year. One of the other misconceptions youve debunked it the fact that the perception is out there, that students, theyre spending their Financial Aid dollars on fancy restaurants, going to bars, any kind of luxury that you can imagine and so therefore, theyre not really spending it where its meant to be. And i want to read a quote because it struck me, the quote on about buying black pants, which is something that you and i and you have young children, i have grown children, and Everybody Knows they need an interview suit, they need, you know, so i just wanted to quote this and have you expound a little on it. The quote is, i dont spend it on luxury items, i dont buy stuff that i just want, 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, et cetera. Its my only pair of black pants and i got a nice button up shirt because you need to look nice for interviews. Other than that, its just dues for the sorority or stuff. I try not to go out and buy food too much. I do buy applesauce and milk, just breakfast items. I have some snack items, hot chocolate. No other, thats it. I can get by without buying luxury items. Hot chocolate was a luxury item for this young woman. I know, people with few resources, who the recipients are have learned for a long time how to manage scarce resources and dont throw things away. There are so many things that are said about college students, and said at elite private institutions where they have the luxury of going to the art museum or having a party or a wonderful spring break, the vast majority of undergraduates dont do anything of those things and the data for the other folks have nothing to do with them. They dont line up. We do not see students spending in frivolous ways and their time on. Two things are notable to me, one thing never asked about about undergraduates, do you spend time studying. Never ask do you spend time caring for other people. Exactly. We saw lots of people making that time investment. Working for other people. And the other thing we saw far from being out partying and drinking with the money. Past past it is an official term remarkably presumptuous. The number that it reaches, first it doesnt take into account one of the most important things in a famous financial resources, dared that. And my subsided family can contribute but is completely ignoring the debt the family possesses been able to do so. In addition, lots of people are working in high schools these days to help families pay when they got to college, even if its just down the street that they spent time at college, the family loses that income. That is how we can sometimes reach what is referred to as a negative family contribution. The problem is no negative numbers are allowed in the federal in. They truncate the number to zero and say we dont have to contribute anything, but they dont say with a money back to the family, which is in fact what they do with those resources. Its really a pretend figure. As so many people say it doesnt seem to matter very much with college completion. Well, that is because it is inaccurate and measurement error when i was a big deal. This is the number plate with measurement error. And that is so disturbing because it is a bureaucratic system. Tell me a little bit about that. They say fafsa is easy to fill out and i think you need a phd to fellow asked that quite frankly. Talk about the bureaucratic nature of the whole package when the students begin. It does get the most attention. This thing is a map. But there is a lot of attention for policymakers right now dealing with fafsa appeared unconcerned about what happens after because as students know, after the fafsa you find that youre not get enough money and many find out out all these extra rules. So to actually take your money from year to year, you have to do a bunch of things. Even if you stay at the same school, same School Coming up to keep keep refiling every single year. Thats not an easy thing to do because of all the paperwork involved. Satisfactory academic progress. If we could explain that every Single School has different rules. They have certain grades but they also complete a certain amount of questions. If you go back to your own experience in the school, when a class didnt turn out to be that way you thought it would be and it was too hard or not which you were really looking forward, you dropped it. Frankly if youre trying to get your grades up, he took easier classes, too. These strategies will backfire if youre on Financial Aid. People doing regular things that most people do in college will actually cause them to lose their Financial Aid and not surprisingly they are taken aback. We are so careful to try and tell students that if you drop this course you drop the lower level. If you drop the lower level your financial leg goes away. Sometimes they dont have a choice because do i didnt have or d. When i have a dream to become something in that course wont help. Tell me about how some of your students in longitudinal study dealt with those issues. A dealt with them pretty badly and i dont blame them. Even as a faculty member that students know i know some of the stuff in this cosponsor they bring their cases. They Say Something like my dad got sick and i missed in School Assignments that cost a lot so i think i should drop it. Im aware of the consequences and so we weigh them. I cant help navigate this. These things dont make sense. You should feel to drop a class if you need to. So we saw stephen who literally dropped below fulltime status and all of a sudden parttime pay top about fulltime pay. The whole formula for distributing money is off base there. What usually did it cost them over time to move slower through college. That is the last thing you want to see. The more it costs. If we want students to go faster, we cant tell them to go faster. They would love to go faster. We dont set up the conditions under which they can go faster. That is to give them the support. I work at Temple University now and one of our programs assigned thing that in my study we actually found really works. Pay students not to work. Student need money so if they can get the grants instead of through working