New data show some colleges are definitively unaffordable for many

By most measures, Aboubacar Konate was an outstanding candidate for college.

Konate graduated second in his class from The English High School in Boston with a 4.5 grade-point average. He was on the student council and debate team, took Advanced Placement classes in history and chemistry, speaks four languages, worked a corporate internship and played three sports: soccer, basketball and track.

He did everything he thought was needed to become the first in his family to go to college: worked hard and proved that he was smart enough to make it.

“I went through all the hoops, the struggles, the obstacles,” Konate said. “College was my dream and my goal.”

But the aspiring engineer fell short on one other measure: having the money to pay.

His father didn’t make enough to save for tuition; if there was anything left after covering rent and food for Konate and his two younger sisters, his father used it to support their grandparents. And while Konate won a substantial scholarship from a foundation run by onetime Boston Red Sox player Adrian González and his wife, he still fell far short of what the private universities he’d dreamed of attending expected him to pay.

The best deal he could get was from a private engineering college that offered Konate little to no financial aid, despite his high school record and economic situation; he would still owe more than $30,000 a year, even after subtracting his González scholarship.

He couldn’t afford it

“I lost all hope,” Konate said. “My family does not have money like that.”

Instead, he enrolled in a less expensive public university. When students do this, studies show, it often leads to lower post-graduate salaries or a higher likelihood of dropping out, reinforcing a cycle of income inequality.

An increasing number of American families are finding themselves in the same situation, according to federal data analyzed by The Hechinger Report in collaboration with the Education Writers Association, or EWA.

For them, after years of escalating college costs and stagnant earnings, the higher educations they desire for their children are conclusively, decisively and categorically out of reach.

“We’ve become numb to the problem of college costs. But this can be a bit of a wakeup call for people,” said Julie Margetta Morgan, a fellow at the liberal think tank the Roosevelt Institute, which focuses on economic policy.

The message: “There’s a giant pool of hardworking students out there who are doing everything right from an academic perspective, the exact story you’d want to see in terms of dreaming big. And many of these students are priced out,” said Mark Huelsman, who studies education trends as a senior analyst at the left-leaning policy organization Dēmos. “It’s heartbreaking.”

Related: Billions in federal financial aid is going to students who aren’t graduating

It’s also simple math: The net prices charged by some private colleges and universities — the actual cost, after grants and discounts — are now significantly higher than some families’ entire annual incomes, the analysis, of U.S. Department of Education data, shows.

There’s some good news in the numbers: The average net price has stayed fairly flat for a decade now, at both public and private institutions, for families earning between $30,000 and $48,000. It’s even dropped slightly at private colleges and universities for families that make $48,000 or more, as those schools dole out more financial aid to fill seats in the sixth year of an enrollment decline.

But for families at the bottom of the income scale, earning $30,000 or less, the cost of college continues its relentless rise, with their average net price, after discounts and financial aid, reaching nearly $20,000 a year at private universities and colleges. Nearly a dozen public universities also charge that much or more, on average, to families in that earnings bracket. The figures are for 2015-16, the most recent year for which they are available.

And those are just the averages. Some private colleges charged a net price of as much as nearly $42,400 a year for families with annual incomes of $30,000 or less.

One school, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, charged a net price of nearly $50,000 for students from families earning $30,000 or less; another, the California Institute of the Arts, nearly $48,000.

The same institutions are equally pricey for middle-income families, costing up to more than $43,700 for those making $30,000 to $48,000 and nearly $50,000 for families that earn $48,000 to $75,000 a year, after scholarships and grants.

The data are available in the updated Tuition Tracker, a tool produced by The Hechinger Report and EWA for students and their families considering college. The website discloses the net price based on a user’s family income, and other essential information, by institution.

“It is completely infeasible to think that families can dedicate even half to three quarters of their income to put their kid through college,” never mind their entire incomes or more, said Debbie Cochrane, vice president of The Institute for College Access and Success, which tracks the debt to which many students turn to fill the gap.

The highest-income families pay, on average, 15 percent of their earnings for college, according to earlier research by the Institute for Higher Education Policy, or IHEP, while low- and moderate-income families are expected to finance an amount equivalent to 100 percent of what they make in a year. By that calculation, half of 2,000 institutions analyzed by IHEP were affordable only to the wealthiest students — those with annual family incomes of $160,000 or more — and one-third only to students from families that made at least $100,000 a year.

A separate Dēmos study found that, even at public universities, students from families earning $30,000 and less in 22 states face net prices of more than $10,000 a year. The net price of college is the equivalent of a third of black families’ median annual income  — and, in 26 states, more than half — and a quarter of Hispanic families’, compared to about a fifth of what white families earn. (The study was supported by the Lumina Foundation, which is also a funder of The Hechinger Report.)

These students often choose cheaper community colleges and second-tier public institutions with far fewer resources to support them, and lower graduation rates. If they do succeed in finishing, their incomes are likely to be lower than if they had attended one of the elite universities or colleges they couldn’t afford.

“How affordable a college is doesn’t mean it’s the right choice for a student,” said Brendan Williams, director of knowledge at the nonprofit UAspire, which helps low-income and first-generation students navigate the route to college. “The cheapest option is not always the best option.”

To continue reading, please visit: https://hechingerreport.org/new-data-show-some-colleges-are-definitively-unaffordable-for-many/