Commencement season is drawing to a close, and for the Class of 2014 that will soon mean this: Hello, real world.
To which the real world hollers back: Congratulations, grads. Now pay back what you owe.
According to Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Edvisors — a band of Web sites that focus on planning and paying for college — America’s latest batch of college graduates enters the world as the most indebted in history. He reckons the student-loan payback is roughly $33,000 for the average graduate, nearly double what borrowers were required to pay back 20 years ago.
But a higher education doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive. Some universities are addressing the rising student-debt issue with an innovative use of an old-fashioned concept: work.
Take, for example, the College of the Ozarks, tucked away in rural Missouri. There, college students pay no tuition for a four-year degree in exchange for 15 hours of on-campus work each week. For those with lower-incomes, 12 weeks of summer work on campus gets you room and board.
Meanwhile, Kentucky’s Berea College, a liberal-arts school located just south of Lexington, accepts only those students who are otherwise unable to afford an education. Ten hours of work per week is required, and students have the option to earn extra pay by putting in a few more work hours for any department in the college.
Out in California, Thomas Aquinas College, a private Catholic institution, accepts no subsidies from the government but manages to keep its tuition to $24,000. Its work-study program has students tending the grounds, serving in cafeterias or working in the library 13 hours a week essentially in exchange for room and board.
Closer to home, Pennsylvania’s Grove City College, unlike so many of its big competitors, aims for its students to leave college debt-free. And it succeeds, by offering tuition about half the national average of private colleges. To boot, students get a computer and printer for keeps.
Smart colleges know parents are asking tougher questions about what their kids are getting in exchange for the ever-escalating tuition dollar.
And smart students can find schools where they will earn a quality degree without incurring the debt overwhelming so many of their peers.
That is, if they are willing to do something generations before have done: work.