Saddling youth with debt won’t strengthen society
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Thank you, Senator Mowbray, for a respectful and interesting exchange of views about the importance of federal aid to students concerning the affordability of higher education on our country.
1) You stated that $180,000 is typically available for students from Polson High School each year in local private and service club scholarships. You also assert correctly that education at a sector of the Montana University System runs about $18,000 per year. Simple math shows that this is the equivalent of only 10 students’ costs to attend an in-state public institution, which happens to be the cheapest form of education available to them. These scholarships are historically swept by about 10 students with particularly strong resumes every year. Many of these scholarships are only available for one year and leave a student struggling to find a new source of financial assistance after only one year.
2) I checked with the Polson High School guidance office, which reports that typically 66 percent of a senior class is college-bound. In 2012’s class of 114, that is about 75 students. In the considerably larger Class of 2014, there will be about 105 college-bound seniors. So as you can see, local scholarships support at best 10 percent of the students that are in need of aid.
3) You point out that $580,000 was provided in 2009 in merit-based scholarships from colleges. This statistic is true, but very little of this money comes from the Montana University System, but rather from private or out-of-state institutions, where students are often paying two or three times the amount of a Montana public education. For example, a year of schooling at the University of Washington costs a student more than $46,000, and the total cost of attendance for a year of school at Brown University costs $53,000. Note that these are merely well-known examples, not specially picked because of high tuition and rates. At around $50,000 per year for four years, a person is paying $200,000 for a four-year education. When you apply this to the $580,000 mentioned, you can see that would pay for the cost of attendance for approximately three students to an out-of-state or private university — an obviously miniscule amount.
Once again, I stress that today’s young people are not looking for a free education; we are merely looking for a way to graduate college without being shackled by crushing personal debt. It is common these days to graduate with $80,000 or more in student loan debt. This is what we protest, not the possibility of having to get a job. If you expect our young people to bail us out of our current economic situation through innovation and hard work, Sen. Mowbray, give us the basic tools without huge debt to pay off before we even get our feet on the ground. This is not a matter of political bias, as we are not influenced by party opinions. This is a matter of investing in the future of our country, more necessary than anything else, and pure common sense on the part of the American people.
Saddling the majority of young people with massive debt is no way to build an economy or a strong society. Do you disagree, Senator Mowbray?
Peregrine Frissell
Polson
(Editor’s note: Peregrine Frissell is a Polson High School student and organizer of the student-led Occupy Polson movement.)
