I Suppose It Had To Happen Eventually

Graduate Sues College for Tuition Reimbursement

Long story short, Trina Thompson is suing Monroe College for her $70,000 in tuition because she is unemployed and cannot find a job. She alleges the school did not do enough to help her find employment after she graduated, her student loans are coming due soon, and she is going to have difficulty paying them. She now believes that her degree isn't worth the money she spent. I suppose this is the logical conclusion of the university-as-business mentality that many students and their parents have developed over the past few decades. But there are so many things wrong with this lawsuit I'm not even sure where to begin.

How about beginning with logic? Trina must not be the sharpest tool in the shed if she hasn't realized by now that there is a recession/depression happening all around her, and that tens of thousands of jobs are routinely being cut out of the economy each month. She must also be a dingbat if she doesn't understand that universities don't magically make jobs just happen for grads -- they can advise, recommend, help you prep your cover letter and resume, and your professors can act as your references. But they can't make a job just appear for you. The only jobs they control are the ones within the university itself.

She also displays a rather naive understanding of how jobs actually work for university grads. You're supposed to start looking in your final semester, so you have something lined up as you graduate, not wait until after you graduate to start looking, because the good jobs will be gone to those who started earlier. To be fair, perhaps she did this, but she didn't mention it (or the articles didn't cover that part). The article states she got her diploma in April of this year -- and promptly filed a lawsuit July 24. That's just three months after graduation. Most advice about finding a job is that it can take 6-9 months to find one. So she isn't even within the range of time where most people would start to worry about a job yet, and her response was not to go to the unemployment office, not to look for temp work, not to head down to McDonald's for some kind of money no matter where it came from -- but to sue the school for all of her tuition money back. Not even pro-rated reimbursement for the number of months she is without a job, which might have made tad more sense.

Trina does put the spotlight on just how much it costs to get a college education and how onerous paying back that debt can be. Jeffrey Williams, a scholar who does substantial work on tuition and student debt, synthesizes an incredible amount of statistical information that should be required reading for parents with a child in college and the child himself. There are very few situations where a student can graduate without being in debt. Their parents can completely foot the bill (rare); they can go to school on full scholarship and not lose any of their money (rare); they can go to one of the few schools that offers free tuition and makes sure you graduate without owing a penny (like Berea). If you can't fit into any of those situations, then you're probably going to graduate with $19,200 of debt on average. Almost a fourth of borrowers have over $30,000 in debt when they graduate. These figures are more than double of a decade ago (and those figures from the mid-90s were triple what they had been a decade before that).

It is no longer true that you can "work your way" through college. Recent studies suggest that in the 1960s,one could work 15 hours/week during the school year and 40 hours/week through the summer, and essentially pay all their college expenses. An Ivy league or private college student would have to work 20 hours/week throughout the school year. Now, that same student would have to work 52 hours a week all year long -- 132 hours/week for an Ivy league/private school -- in order to pay all college expenses. Jeffrey Williams has also likened student loan debt to indentured servitude, especially since it will take an average of 15 years to pay off a standard Stafford federal loan. You should read his article linked above -- the similarities really are quite striking. But Williams goes on to explain that debt does more than financially cripple people -- it is a teacher in its own right.

Debt, he says, teaches students first and foremost that that higher education is a consumer service. Trina certainly seems to have bought into this worldview. She feels she didn't get her "money's worth," and she defines that in terms of salary. She doesn't consider higher education as having taught her any useful skills beyond the ones she believed she needed to get a good job. This same mentality is what causes students to think they pay tuition for A's and their professors are customer service personnel.

Williams says debt also teaches career choices, and I see the truth of this especially in my first generation college students. They are too scared to try out becoming a history teacher or an astronomer, because they and their families are afraid it just won't pay. So they go into business and nursing instead. One of the reasons they give is being able to pay off their student loans. As a teacher, I owe more in student loan debt than I make every year before taxes. It will take me 21 years at my current rates to pay off my debt. Thank goodness I consider getting an education to be more than a financial investment, because that's one stock pick that certainly wouldn't have given a high return. I know that people like to think college degrees yield more money over a lifetime, and in the long run they do. But none of those figures of how much more a college grad allegedly earns over a high school grad account for student loan debt. If the stats took the debt off the top of the salary, the numbers would start dropping down.

The truth of the matter is, paying for higher education can feel like highway robbery. Plenty of people besides and including Jeffrey Williams have demonstrated that higher education could offer free tuition, remove the onerous debt students leave college with, and still make profit. The middle man (loan companies, including Sallie Mae) is the obstacle to the problem. Trina's situation is no different than most other college students who have graduated with a mountain of debt into an economy not very interested in receiving them.

But Trina can't lay the blame on her college for not handing a job over to her. They don't control jobs. They can, however, control student debt. Trina likely won't -- and shouldn't -- win her case against Monroe. But universities and the agitators inside them need to be pushing for a change in the way higher education is paid for. It's beyond time.

-- DV