American students are facing similar issues to Canadian students when it comes to student debt and rising tuition fees. Lindsay McCluskey is the president of the U.S Student Association. She was interviewed via phone on November 3, 2010. She raises concerns about how public education is funded in America.
McCluskey says,” The federal government plays no role in directly providing funds so public higher education can remain affordable. What we’ve seen is the emergence of what they call the ‘high cost, high aid’ model where they hike up tuition fees and say that they are also going to raise financial aid.”
There’s also a problem with the type of student aid in the U.S McCluskey says, “I think one of the other trends that we’ve seen is a transition from grant aid to loan aid and we’ve seen more students that are receiving financial aid in the form of loans as opposed to grants. We need to stem the tide of that trend and really transition back to providing more grant aid.”
Lost Education, Lost Opportunities
There are deeper social effects of the increasing cost of post secondary education that McCluskey points out. One of the most serious is that,” there are more and more people being priced out of higher education and therefore don’t have the same kind of opportunities most of us have and therefore don’t have the same access to a middle class lifestyle that many of us who graduate college do.”
McCluskey says another impact of the increasing cost of post secondary education is that students rush to get their degree and in her view this means that,” the college experience itself is being, in my mind, bled dry of a lot of the intellectual exploration that it’s meant to allow young people to have.”
This intellectual exploration is part of a healthy democracy for McCluskey. More fundamentally she says, “Affordable, accessible higher education is such a building block for a democracy and if we lose it and it becomes increasingly less accessible I worry about not only the implications it has on our ability to go to college but the ability to have a real, strong, critical democracy in the United States. “
McCluskey wants to see students act on creating affordability in the system. She explains, “First and foremost as students I think we have a responsibility to fight both for those who are in public higher education but to really fight for those who don’t have access to higher education because of the costs but also because there are many people that grow up in this country that are told from a young age that college is not for them.”
Federally Funded Support
McCluskey believes the ultimate solution for American public higher education is a federally funded program of support. She says, “One of the solutions that students need to fight for is for this federal government to intervene and create a funding mechanism that will support state systems of public higher education not only during this economic crisis but for years to come. “
One of the ways to effect a change is through local action McCluskey says. She is urging students to take action. She says, “ I think we need to see students demonstrating on their campuses against tuiton and fee increases, I think we need students rallying, we need to students at their state capitol demonstrating. We need to have students really call for an end to a system that’s putting them in debt, we need to see students calling for fee rollbacks as opposed to tuition freezes.”
McCluskey also sees the issue of decreasing state funding for public higher education as part of a larger trend in society. She says, “I don’t that our issue is happening ensiloed from anything else. I think its very much a part of trends that have existed in our country for the past couple of decades that have impacted other issues as well. I absolutely think its not just about public higher education, its about kind of a societal shift, a belief in a public good and a belief in caring for one another that we need to rebuild in our society.”
Related article:
Student Squeeze: The Rising Cost of Higher Education
For more information on this story you can visit the Canadian Federation of Students or the U.S. Students Association.
