Words from Vowell « The Quick and the Ed

Words from Vowell

Sarah Vowell offers a paeon to Pell Grants:

I paid my way through Montana State University with student loans, a minimum-wage job making sandwiches at a joint called the Pickle Barrel, and — here come the waterworks — Pell Grants. Thanks to Pell Grants, I had to work only 30 hours a week up to my elbows in ham instead of 40.

Ten extra hours a week might sound negligible, but do you know what a determined, junior-Hillary type of hick with a full course load and onion-scented hands can do with the gift of 10 whole hours per week? Not flunk geology, that’s what. Take German every day at 8 a.m. — for fun! Wander into the office of the school paper on a whim and find a calling. I’m convinced that those 10 extra hours a week are the reason I graduated magna cum laude, which I think is Latin for “worst girlfriend in town.”

People tend to talk and think about student financial aid and college access in pretty straightforward terms: College is the kingdom of opportunity, but they charge at the gate to get in. Give students financial aid and they’ll go to college; don’t give them aid and they won’t.

But while economics tells us that there must be students whose go / no-go college attendance decisions are affected by marginal differences in price, in the grand scheme of things it’s pretty clear that most students are going to college whether or not Pell Grants and other aid programs are well-funded. College has doubled in price in real dollars over the last two decades, aid programs haven’t kept up, yet the percentage of high school graduates going on to higher education hovers at an all-time high.

Most students, in other words, are entering the kingdom, one way or another. The real difference financial aid makes is in what happens when they get there. Spiraling tuition is forcing more low-income students out of the four-year sector into community colleges, and while you can get a great education in the two-year sector, your odds of ultimately earning a bachelor’s degree are much lower. Without sufficient financial aid, a lot of students are forced to work near full-time, and while Sarah Vowell went on to the pages of the New York Times, studies show that working 30+ hours a week is a significant risk factor for dropping out before earning a degree. Or students grind through, but miss the experiences that make college so worthwhile. Or they finish, but buckle under the burden of debt (un-dischargeable in bankruptcy, thank you Sallie Mae) five or ten years down the road.

In other words, Pell Grants don’t always make the difference between nothing and something when it comes to a college education. But they do make the difference between something and something worth having.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Words from Vowell”

Jon H. Oberg says:

September 2, 2008 at 8:49 am

What you write about Pell grants could be true. Or maybe not. Almost all evidence is anecdotal. Unfortunately, despite two statutory requirements (GPRA and ESRA) to review Pell and other postsecondary finance programs with appropriate research and evaluation methods, the Department of Education does not do so.