Editor’s note: This commentary is by Robert Gershon, a professor of communications at Castleton State College.
The state Legislature is currently considering S.40, a bill to establish a committee charged with finding ways to restore a reasonable level of funding for higher education. I strongly support its adoption. Vermont and its young people will suffer greatly if such a plan is not developed and executed.
We have increasingly failed to invest in the state’s future, allowing higher education funding to dwindle almost to the vanishing point.
When I started working at Castleton State College 37 years ago the state provided more than half of the Vermont State Colleges’ budget. The percentage is now just under 13 percent, a level that ranks 49th out of the 50 states. Where does the difference come from? Mostly, the avalanche of debt our sons and daughters take on.
Many students start out with high hopes, only to fall behind in both their academics and finances when outside jobs and cascading debt take their toll, leaving them with no degree and significant debt.
Despite the state colleges’ extraordinary efforts to trim spending — an effort that, if continued, will inevitably result in a decline in quality — student debt has skyrocketed. Sixty-three percent of Vermont college students graduate in debt. The average student owes almost $29,000. What a way to start out in life! Yet the earning power of a college degree holder remains so far greater than that of a high school-only grad and the unemployment rate so much lower, what choice do most of our kids have?
Worse, many students start out with high hopes, only to fall behind in both their academics and finances when outside jobs and cascading debt take their toll, leaving them with no degree and significant debt. Yesterday still another bright student came into my office to tell me he was dropping out. He plans to go to California to live with relatives while he establishes residency, so he can then go to school for about half of what it costs him now. Like more than half of his peers in the VSC, he is a first-generation college student, someone looking to a college education to provide him with greater opportunity than the previous generation. Now he looks at another state to provide that opportunity and he takes his considerable talents there. At that rate it’s no wonder Vermont’s population has the second highest median age in the country.
On the other hand, 84 percent of our Vermont State College students stay in Vermont after they graduate. It’s these graduates that we depend on to be, as so many of my former students now are, the innovators, the teachers, the journalists, the business leaders, and, yes, the legislators. We need to provide them with an affordable higher education, one that will empower them to give back to the state without keeping them in debilitating debt half of their adult lives.
