Vol. 74/No. 4      February 1, 2010

According to the Pew Research Center there are about 3.4 million young adults at community colleges and 8 million at four-year colleges in the United States, an all-time high.

While enrollment at four-year institutions has stayed steady, in the last few years as the economic crisis deepened and unemployment climbed, millions of students opted for two-year community colleges, which are cheaper.

At the same time, university administrations are jacking up fees and cutting services.

“It feels like I’m being punished for having gone to school,” Sarah Kostecki told the Wall Street Journal. Kostecki graduated from privately owned DePaul University in 2008 with $87,000 in debts. Her $685-a- month payments are equal to more than a third of her take-home pay. Tuition at DePaul is more than $26,000 a year.

Publicly funded schools cost less, but are still pricey. At Arizona State University in-state residents pay $6,800 a year in tuition and fees; non-residents pay $19,600.

Millions of students receive government grants, but this doesn’t come close to covering all the costs.  
 
Loan defaults shoot up
According to the Project on Student Debt, the average owed by graduating college seniors in 2008 was $23,200, up from $18,650 in 2004.

Due to rising fees, higher unemployment, and lower-paying jobs upon graduation, default rates for federally guaranteed student loans reached close to 7 percent in 2007, the latest year figures are available, up from 4.6 percent in 2005.

Students borrowed $19 billion in private loans in the 2007-2008 school year, six times the amount they borrowed a decade before. The interest rates and default rates for private loans are also climbing.

While more students are sinking deeper into debt, schools are cutting back on teaching staff and equipment. A study by the Delta Cost Project points out that spending per student at community colleges dropped 5.9 percent from 2002 to 2006.

Only one in five students at two-year colleges graduate within three years. At four-year colleges the rate is only slightly better: two out of five get their degrees within six years.

While the number of college students and graduates, especially from the working class, has grown tremendously over the last half century, holding a college diploma—unless it’s from the “elite” 10 percent of universities—is not a huge help in getting a job today.

A survey by the Project on Student Debt shows that unemployment for recent college graduates rose to 10.6 percent in the third quarter of 2009. Many of those who do get hired are forced to take lower-paying jobs, often unrelated to their field of study.  
 
Paying for college ‘brand name’
Graduates from elite schools continue to garner higher-paying positions. An article in Democracy Journal by Kevin Carey, who works for Education Sector, a Washington, D.C., “think tank,” notes that today’s children of privilege are paying for “a prominent brand name, the primary value of which is to signal to the rest of the world that they’re rich and connected enough to pay the price.”

One indication of how education reinforces class divisions under capitalism is the amount of resources available at elite schools compared to public colleges.

At Ivy League Harvard, with a 97 percent graduation rate, the university spends $51,870 per year on each student’s “education.” California State University in Los Angeles, where less than 32 percent graduate, spends under $8,000 a year per student.

Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, in the pamphlet The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning, notes that “The purpose of education in class society is not to educate.

“The purpose of education,” he explains, “is to give ‘the educated’ a stake in thinking they are going to be different—slightly better off, slightly more white collar—than other people who work all their lives.”

For lawyers and other “professionals,” Barnes adds, their diploma “becomes a justification for living off part of the fruits of the exploitation of workers, working farmers, and other toiling producers.”

The working class, however, is for reorganizing society “so that education is a human activity from the time we are very young until the time we die,” Barnes writes. Without that, he says, “there will be no education worthy of working, creating humanity.”  
 
 
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