A College Education Should Be Available to Everyone

I have been deeply disturbed by the direction this country is turning in regards to funding for education. Since you asked about college funding in your email of 1/13/05 I will stick to that, but needless to say, there is just as much that could be said about what is wrong with K-12 school funding as well.

Here is my personal story with attending college; this is coming from someone who has been through UC Los Angeles as an undergraduate and UC Berkeley as a graduate student, but started out as a child on welfare living in sliding rent apartments. I grew up the only child of a single mother - one who battled depression, disability, poverty and my dad to get child support. We lived in tons of different apartments and houses, never "on the right side of the tracks." I guess the one location that can sum it up was the house that was across the street from a methamphetamine lab where 4 children lived. My mom, unlike at least some of the poor people around me, knew how to control her money and be responsible with it and never wasted it. But there was never enough, and more than a few times we were the recipients of food baskets from churches, gleaners, etc. She always said I could do whatever I wanted and told me I should go to college.

When I graduated high school and applied to college, I was awarded a $2500 scholarship to UC Davis. But the tuition was more than that, and I would have to pay for my living expenses on top of that. We talked to the financial aid office at UCD at the time, and they didn’t seem to help much. They gave us a budget plan that estimated it would like cost around $12,000 per year for me to attend, more than my mom even made each year.

So I went to a community college. Despite all of that earlier stuff I got lucky. My Grandfather (the only one in our family with any money, and actually not very much I later realized) had agreed to give me $2500 per year while I was successfully completing my bachelor’s degree. Tuition at the community college was low, and I actually got it waived through the Pell Grant system. The Pell Grant also gave me $3000 per year. I also worked about 20 hours per week. With those three sources of money, I was able to make it through the three years at the community college level. Since my experience tuition at community colleges has doubled, and the Bush administration has cut Pell Grants, even to the poorest of students.

Then I applied to the UC System. I was scared. Tuition was more than $3000 per year. Rent around all the good UC campuses is exorbitant. I knew I was going to have to take out loans. I got a measly $500 scholarship to UCLA for my first year there (I had a 3.95 GPA from the community college). My rent was $800 per month (~80% of what my mom made at the time, so she couldn’t help). I was able to get Cal Grants, but they made it very clear I would only be eligible two years. The Cal Grants covered my tuition, and gave me enough left over for my text books and about ½ month worth of rent. I couldn’t find a job through the work grants on campus because most of them were during class hours, and working off campus was unfeasible due to time constraints, which were magnified by the Cal Grant constraints – I HAD to finish my intensive major (engineering) in two years, because my main source of funding would be cut off after that. I took out loans each year I was there, and the summer session which I had to attend in order to finish within the Cal Grants constraints. They made us go to loan workshops where they scare you with stories of people graduating with all these loans and not being able to pay them off – of having to pay them off like their entire working career, not being able to buy a house, etc. I didn’t need to be scared by these people – I was already scared stiff – I was borrowing HUGE sums of money in my world, amounts rivaling my moms entire yearly income. But I had come SO far, I was determined to see it through, and if I had to take out loans then I had to. Other students around me were driving Lexus SUVs their parents had bought them. Again, I got lucky. My second year at UCLA I was ‘IN’ at the Alumni Association, which had given me the $500 scholarship my first year. My second year I got two scholarships through them – one for $3000 and one for $4000, plus the Cal Grant still paid my tuition. So I didn’t have to take out such a large amount in loans the second year. And now Cal Grants have been cut and tuition raised even more. And rents in these places never go up, and dorms are no cheaper.

I went to work for a couple of years, and then decided I wanted to go back to graduate school. Again I got lucky. My department at UC Berkeley paid my graduate tuition, and gave me a stipend (I had graduated Magna Cum Laude from UCLA). The tuition when I applied in January 2003 was around $5000 per year, but was around $6200 by the time I enrolled in August. My degree was technically done in one year; if I had stayed the extra year I wanted to my tuition would have been ~$7500 for the next year. Since the department was paying for several students like me out of its own coffers, with the tuition raises they could help fewer and fewer students each year. Plus, their stipends were based on Academics, not financial need.

But one thing that saddened me just as much as the tuition raises and grant cuts was that pretty much ALL of the graduate students around me were from rich backgrounds. At UC Berkeley in my graduate classes, the kids talked about trips Colorado for skiing, trips to Europe and Asia, South America and even Antarctica. I met a lot of nice, smart people. But they were mostly rich and white (there were no Latinos, one was black – a rich person from Haiti). Back at UCLA I had gone to a scholarship appreciation dinner at UCLA, and I was sitting with Alumni Association staff and donors. One of the staffers told me that UCLA had only admitted ~25 non-athlete black males that year. That school has about 10,000 new students each year.

That is the thing that just stings me from the inside looking back: not one other person from my old neighborhoods has gone to college, and if you went onto a UC campus and did a survey I would guarantee you would find a much bigger percentage of rich kids than actually exist in society in general. Especially in graduate school, but even definitely at the undergraduate level.

I have heard that 1 out of 2 kids from families that make over like $100,000 (?) per year go to college, but only 1 out of 17 kids from families that make under like $15,000 - $20,000 (?) go to college. And I would believe it. The obstacles to going to college are massive when you come from a family that makes so little. There may be no knowledge of what you can do with a college education, there are likely no role models, and parents may be scared to send children off to something they’ve never experienced. And when tuition is a quarter to a half of what your family lives off of, and the financial aid offices are rude and unhelpful and won’t guarantee or even give you hope for anything (5 out of 5 college financial aid offices I have dealt with are like this), and all the news is that tuition is raising, grants are being cut, and rent is $1000 near the college, then going to college seems, and for many IS, impossible. I made it, but I know I was lucky at every step of the way, given things that many students are not ($2,500 per year from my grandfather, the Pell Grant, Cal Grant, major academic based Scholarships at two UCs, etc). Plus, since I went through school tuition has risen, and Pell and Cal Grants have gone down, all while campus enrollment rates were slowed. Even the student loan system I used the Bush administration is now talking about scaling back on.

I don’t know if I have conveyed it, but my main message, from first hand experience, is that a good college education is not dispersed evenly in this country. Many factors, especially the all important dollar, keep poor people from attending college, even if they are more able and qualified than the rich person who goes in their place.