In her 2016 book, Paying the Price, former University of Wisconsin Professor Sara Goldrick-Rab presents the harsh realities of what she deems are the new economics of college in America. Providing the results of a six-year study that began in 2008 as 3,000 students entered public universities and colleges across Wisconsin, Paying the Price is a sobering look at the personal and financial costs of inadequate funding for public higher education and an inefficient financial aid system.
Now a professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University, Goldrick-Rab was awarded the 2018 Grawemeyer Prize in Education for Paying the Price. Goldrick-Rab pledged the $100,000 in prize money to the FAST Fund—a fund she conceived to fast-track aid to students for necessities like rent, food and fees. She has promised to match three-to-one all donations made to the FAST Fund, which counts Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC) as one of its recipients.
The Shepherd Express recently asked Professor Goldrick-Rab about Wisconsin mindsets, public higher education in Milwaukee, potential improvements and free public college.
Could you describe what you call the “new economics of college in America”?
The new economics of college is what surrounds people making choices right now about college. I try to separate what I call the old economics, which is the idea that you’ll go to college, it will be affordable, it will pay off, and if you get in debt you’ll be able to pay it back. That’s the old economics. The new economics is you go and you face higher prices than most people have ever faced, your family has fewer resources than most families have ever had, and there is less help available both from your college—because colleges are increasingly underfunded—and from whatever remains of the public safety net. So, the new economics of college is a combination of what the colleges are charging, what states are charging, what families have available and what supports are available to help the students.
I watched an interview you gave where you referred to FAFSA as the “small American bureaucratic tragedy.” What did you mean by that?
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When we use forms and applications for anything, frankly, the goal is to find out who needs something, verify that they need it and give it to them. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) makes a real mess of that process. FAFSA doesn’t do a great job of figuring out who needs what. It wastes an enormous amount of time. It wastes an enormous amount of families’ time and the college’s time and the government’s time. Not only does it do things slowly and badly, it does things very inequitably. That’s why I call it a nightmare. It’s not only inefficient and bad at its job, it’s also inequitable.
Times have changed. Circumstances for students have changed. Why hasn’t financial aid kept up with the times?
Some people would argue that it didn’t want to keep up with the times. I think the truth is some people want financial aid to do what it was intended to do—to make it possible for people without money to go to college. I think other people would argue that financial aid is meant to lead people to think that they have a fair shot at college, but not actually give them a fair shot. Because if we gave them a fair shot, more people who start from behind would actually get somewhere. So, I think we have both of those forces competing. It’s not doing what it needs to be doing for it to be equitable; it’s doing something else. It’s wasting a lot of people’s time and it’s making a big mess.
In your book, it’s nice that you offer solutions. Of those changes you proposed, which do you think would be the most realistic or the easiest to implement?
Well, I try to give a range. So, there are things that you could call low-hanging fruit that are mainly about giving people better information, like telling students that they might be eligible for food stamps. It’s not rocket science to tell them, but somebody’s got to do that work, and they also have to want to tell them. Some people don’t. It’s a basic concept: Let students know things.
Another change would be to reduce the number of requirements. Take emergency aid; I write a little bit about it. Emergency aid is delivered outside the financial aid system. It’s meant to get to students quickly. You know, when we give up $200 or $300 to students, we have a choice: We can create another application like the FAFSA, or we cannot create another application. A lot of people are still leaning on creating those applications and trying to stop people from so-called cheating, but we could just decide not to do that and put a little more trust in our students.
You also include a chapter on Milwaukee. It’s called the “City of Broken Dreams.” What were your impressions of higher education in Milwaukee and of the students you followed here?
I started to get to know Milwaukee when I first got to Wisconsin, which was in 2004. The study started in 2008, during a recession. I was in Wisconsin until 2016, and I’m still funding work in Milwaukee right now. I think it’s one of the saddest situations I’ve seen. Things are bad here in Philadelphia, too.
It’s not like everything’s rosy in other places, but there are so many hardworking students at places like MATC who are just trying to do the right thing for their families. They work all day, they work all night. They go to school with professors who do really care about them. One of the things that was great to see at MATC was how committed the faculty was. I didn’t find to be the case what some people say—that faculty members are only in it for themselves—I never saw that. I saw people knocking themselves out—faced with prices that were totally beyond their reach that they were hurting themselves trying to pay.
Milwaukee is the place where, for 10 years now, we’ve been studying food and housing insecurity in higher education; Milwaukee is the place we first saw it. You know, watching students become homeless from trying to pay their bills in college, that’s not a one-off in Milwaukee; that’s a story that’s going on all over the city. And it’s not only happening at the technical college, it’s happening at UW-Milwaukee.
So, I literally watched dreams break. It was ridiculous. I was thinking, “How can it get this bad? How can we let [such] a situation go on?” In some of the charts, you can see that there is money in Wisconsin; it’s just not going to Milwaukee. And it’s not the first time we’ve told that story. That’s an old story. But so many people around the country have said to me, “You’ve got to be kidding. How can Wisconsin do this?” And I’ve thought, “I don’t think you’ve probably looked at your own city; it’s probably happening there, too.” This is the story of these urban universities and these urban colleges.
Is part of the problem that colleges are admitting students who aren’t academically ready? Is this a trend that you see nationally?
I think the frame is different than reality. I think people are saying these schools are “admitting people who aren’t ready” when what’s going on is people are demanding access to college, and the schools are doing their job by letting them come. Because college in this country is not only supposed to be for the people for whom high school went well. College in this country is supposed to be a second chance. We don’t think its right for your education to be over at 18 just because your high school didn’t go well. You’re supposed to get another shot.
UWM is a second chance institution. So, the question is not taking people that aren’t “ready,” but can UWM get ready for those people? I see UWM trying, and I’m following these so-called reforms. I see it trying, but I also think it’s really unfair to ask the school to do this without resources. I watch it get beaten up constantly. You know, “Why aren’t they doing this?” Karen Herzog just had a piece about how UWM should be like Georgia State. [Laughs] Georgia State has so much more money than UWM it’s not even funny. It’s not fair. Students are justifiably angry. The black student dropout rate at UWM is so scary, but it’s not just a function of a school not trying; that’s just not true.
It feels very much like the book What’s the Matter with Kansas?
Having lived in Wisconsin as long as I did, I have to say that there’s cultural stuff… A lot of these people come from these cultures where there is this me-centered, boot-strapper mentality [where] you expect other people to get there the way you got there. We have a lot of people across Wisconsin who are resentful of people who get anything else, and I watched it over and over and over, and I was blown away because that wasn’t how I was raised. I did not understand their mentality.
This is not a new mentality. [It’s] the politics of resentment that I refer to in the book [and] that Kathy Cramer Walsh has written about in Madison. She’s certainly not the first person to capture that people are resentful of those who have things—including an education. And yet, you’re right, it’s a combination of the What’s the Matter with Kansas? stuff, and it’s a combination of Kathy Cramer Walsh’s stuff, and [of] Joe Soss (who also used to be at UW-Madison) who has written about racial politics and its effect on funding.
It shouldn’t be lost on anybody that it’s the brownest part of the state that’s getting smacked. And the schools that are darkest in complexion are the ones that are deeply underfunded. I don’t think that’s being said loudly enough. It’s a dark and dismal situation.
What I don’t understand is how Wisconsin was ever so progressive. I don’t understand. How did that happen? Where did it go? Because it’s so gone.
Do we have reason to hope that change is possible?
Yes, we do. Look, I run something called The Wisconsin HOPE Lab, right? And I feel pretty strongly about that, and I think it was easier even two years ago, frankly, to feel like that, because we could at least see people—especially at the top levels of government—trying to fix it. I mean, President Barack Obama … he didn’t fix a lot, I have to say, but he tried, and that was good. And now, we don’t have that at the federal level; we have the opposite, but I will say that even five or 10 years ago when we started this, when talking about the price of college, people wouldn’t even acknowledge that food and housing were important parts of the discussion, but they’re talking about them now.
UWM wasn’t talking about a food pantry and all of that stuff before, and now they are, and they’re talking about the real reasons that students are dropping out. Part of the way we solve these problems is that people just get educated on them, and some of us work damn hard to make that happen. There is still more to do, but there is that glimmer of hope that, when people recognize there is a problem, there are more people working on it. That’s the first step.
Should public higher education be free?
Yes, public higher education should be free. I feel really strongly about this, and it’s not because I just really love giving away the government’s money. Education does enormously good things for people. We say it’s one of the best inventions out there. It changes your life. It gives you so many things that nobody else can take away, and the price of college is keeping people from that education. Making it free simplifies things.
I keep dealing with [people] who say, “I don’t want to make it free, because then middle-class people will get it.” And I say, “What is your problem with the middle class getting an education, too?” I just don’t understand why we think only poor people should have low prices. The middle class has been phased out as well, so why wouldn’t we put everybody under the same umbrella together? Then they’ll all realize that when the umbrella has holes in it, they need to fix it, because they’re all there together.
Right now, they’re all under different umbrellas, because nobody knows what the hell is going on. They’re all so divided. I don’t think it’s a problem to pay for the middle class in order to help the people with no money. We don’t have people saying, “Oh, I’m not going to send my kid to eighth grade because it costs money.” I want to take tuition off the table. It’s a huge reason why people don’t go.
To learn more about Professor Sara Goldrick-Rab, Paying the Price or the FAST Fund, visit saragoldrickrab.com.
