The Badger Herald and WORT last week hosted a panel discussion on student debt, focused on finding solutions to the ever-growing problem of student debt.
The discussion, moderated by University of Wisconsin journalism professor Michael Wagner, also touched on higher education politics in Wisconsin, shared governance issues and their impact on students, whether loan refinancing is a good option and whether the tuition freeze has worked for students.
The panelists were:
- Sara Goldrick-Rab, UW professor of educational policy studies and sociology and founding director of the Wisconsin HOPE Lab
- Noel Radomski, director of the Wisconsin Center of the Advancement of Postsecondary Education
- Madison Laning, chair of the Associated Students of Madison
- Scot Ross, executive director of One Wisconsin Now
Below is a transcript of the discussion, lightly edited for style and clarity.
Wagner: Professor Goldrick-Rab, you’ve talked a lot in the past about student debt and how important of a problem that is. You’ve also noted perhaps a more important priority is college affordability in the first place, especially for low-income students. How do these issues go together, and what can be done about it?
Goldrick-Rab: The main project of the Wisconsin HOPE Lab is to make college more affordable. There are a lot of reasons why we want to make college more affordable, and one of those reasons is the current student debt crisis. I certainly would agree that there is a crisis. I have peers out there that argue it’s not a crisis, that it’s a temporary small-ish problem. I don’t agree with that. But our focus is really on how we got here in the first place, and I believe that this was something we could’ve seen coming quite some time ago.
We have a financial aid system that was built for a very different time. It was crafted in the mid-1960s at a time when most people did not go to college, and in particular when only the wealthiest tended to be able to get to go. We built a financial aid system that is really focused solely, almost entirely, on the neediest, which is sort of what they call it. What that really means is through a very strange formula, they sort between families using that FAFSA application that we’re all such big fans of, and they decide that you need money and you don’t. And then they allocate some money. There’s a big myth out there that they allocate a lot of money. They don’t. They allocate just enough money to make people feel they should say thank you but not really enough to make college affordable. And then they leave everybody else out.
So the student debt crisis has really been created by the failures of that system to control college costs but also to distribute enough financial aid to the people who need it and to address the needs of all the other people who are not included in it.
So there are really two types of folks that are really struggling with student debt today. The first group are those neediest people who frankly are not getting nearly enough money from the system and who have to borrow even though they have very low chances of completing college. So today’s Pell Grant recipient, who was never supposed to have to take to take debt, never supposed to have to accept loans in the current system, 90 percent of those [Pell Grant recipients] who graduate from college today have debt.
One in three who enter public higher education leave public higher education with no credential, they don’t complete [a degree], and they on average $9,000 in debt. I would argue those are the people who are in the most pain. They are now high school graduates with debt, and they’re going to have a really hard time paying it off.
And then the other group that’s getting a lot of debt are the people who are getting left out by the system who are not wealthy. That would be the vast majority of Americans. That would be the moderate to middle-income folks whose real family incomes have been declining over time and they were offered no grants. They’re offered only loans. I put them second, and I put them second because overall, they have fairly good chances of graduating from college, and because they graduate from college, they’re more likely to be able to repay their debt — not comfortably, but their chances of repayment are decent, and so their chances of having their lives completely ruined are lower.
So in the order of priorities, which we’re forced into because we’re told we don’t have enough money to pay for things, we prioritize them this way. Our main concerns are in that order, and we’re very, very concerned about making sure that this does not happen again, that we use the current crisis to do something for the future so we don’t have another cohort of you sitting here in another couple of years with even more debt, and this becomes this vicious cycle and wait to see what your children will be facing. Those are our concerns.
Wagner: So as we think about these issues, some of our national lawmakers and people aspiring to be national lawmakers, including Russ Feingold and Elizabeth Warren have talked about Student Emergency Loan Refinancing Act. This is an idea to increase taxes on the wealthy to allow students to refinance their student loans. Is that where we should be attacking this problem, or is that small ball and not really solving all the issues?
Radomski: Part of the root cause of the problem is the state disinvestment in higher education. This week, we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Higher Education Act. But what has happened is that states, from both Democrats and Republicans. Looking at Wisconsin [former Gov. Jim] Doyle had and now [Gov. Scott] Walker consistently decreased state revenue to the UW System. At the same time, you also have increasing college costs. And as Sara knows better than I, don’t think about college costs as just tuition and fees. It’s also housing, textbooks, food, beverage, traveling, cars.
So when you discuss federal interventions and federal policies as relating to emergency loans, I would say those are on the margins. Not to say that they’re not important, but if I were to say something at the federal level, something I would urge both Republicans and Democrats to pursue is what was called the maintenance of effort during the federal stimulus package. What that was is a federal requirement to states. If they wanted federal money in higher education, they had to spend at least what they spent in 2006. That was in 2008 or 2009.
So that’s a lever. It’s a lever from the federal government. So if I were advising Warren or anyone else, that’s what I would say. Use the federal government to mandate minimum investment so that the amount of revenue from the state, we all know what it will be. And then you can start playing around with state policies, and we start emphasizing low tuition as something that we honor and privilege. The state of Wisconsin has had a rich history of being a low-tuition, low-aid state, whereas we now hear presidents of the system and chancellors and others saying, “We should be going to the market rate.”
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If we were to get the federal government to tell the state, “Do this,” then we can start tackling the issues at the system level and the campus level, such as need-based aid, not merit-based aid, which is what the chancellor is now advocating. We do other things, like loan counseling, a whole array of other things with lower costs better outcomes. So I would push one thing at the federal level and multiple things at the state, system and campus level.
Laning: For refinancing, for students, it’s a no-brainer. Why can’t we refinance? We should have refinancing for loans no matter what. In terms of solving the student debt crisis, I think making college free today or tomorrow, there’s still hundreds of thousands of people that have debt. If higher education were to become free, that’s not helping get rid of their debt in any way. They’ve already incurred those costs. They’ve either dropped out school or have a degree or any of these other circumstances.
Refinancing loans will help a large number of students in the nation, so talking about refinancing, I think, is really, really important. It will help a lot of students. Even though students that may be thinking about dropping out and starting to work, if they were able to refinance their loans, that could be kind of a bump to keep them going through their education before they graduate. But I definitely think that it is rooted in the cost of higher education.
Refinancing is a very good thing that we shouldn’t just not talk about because we start talking about the cost of tuition. I think a lot of people get stuck thinking, “It’s tuition that’s the problem, and that’s how we have a tuition freeze, and we need to keep working on these kinds of things,” and they kind of dismiss refinancing loans, which is just as good of a solution that will help a lot of students.
Wagner: So is the tuition freeze playing a role in helping mitigate the crisis from getting worse? Is it causing it to get worse?
Laning: I think the tuition freeze is good for in-state students who aren’t paying more money. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in a year. I’ve already heard from every single person I talk to, whether they’re in the Capitol, whether they’re in Bascom, wherever they are, tuition’s going to go up in the next round. How much that is is going to be very scary for a lot of students. But it is important to remember that out-of-state students, international students are paying a ton more money just to attend this university this year than they were last year, $3,000 to $4,000 more in just one year. They’re going to be paying that same amount increase going into next year. So there are students that are incurring more and more debt even though there is a tuition freeze. It’s not really solving any problems in that realm.
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Goldrick-Rab: I would argue that the tuition freeze is actually costing more money for students in two ways. I know it sounds good. Believe me, I totally get that. But taking aside this institution, which frankly has more resources than anybody else in this state, the tuition freeze actually means a reduction in resources for the kinds of things that students actually need in order to complete their degrees. So if you can’t finish your degree in four years, now it takes five because you can’t get the courses that you need, and you don’t have support to help you finish, then multiply that tuition over five years instead of four. Will that happen in Madison? No, not for the most part, but it might for some students.
Part of the problem there is really, frankly, an equity issue. We can say to ourselves, “That’s fine for us.” But if you’re going to live in the state long-term, you need to worry about the drop-out rates that are going to be created and the additional debt that’s going to be created for people who have less than you do around the rest of the state. That’s my main concern about that.
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Also, I do think that tuition will have a very substantial jump the next time that it’s made possible. And that will create a jolt for some students. Further, I actually think that having tuition rise for some students on the campus and not others actually does end up passing costs onto the others. So it’s very clear that campuses that cater to wealthier students price out the other students because you can’t afford the things around you.
The housing prices in this area, everybody knows they’re going up. Why is that? That is happening because of out-of-state students. I’m not blaming the out-of-state students, I’m blaming the person who’s charging them more and putting a premium on their heads and catering to them. The landlords know this. So that is a very concrete example of where the costs are getting passed onto you, even though the tuition is not rising. It’s something that sounds good politically and short-term, and that’s the tricky thing about higher ed finance. It’s complicated enough that if it’s explained to you in simple ways, you’ll go for it, and you’ll think it’s progressive, even though in fact, it’s actually doing you harm.
Wagner: Scot, you’ve talked about this at One Wisconsin Now. You released a series of bits of evidence about how higher education costs cost us in ways that we wouldn’t necessarily think are directly related to higher education. Why don’t you share a little bit of that?
Ross: First of all, I want to start with this. My name is Scot Ross, and I was a student loan debtor from 1987 to 2013. I made my final payment on my 44th birthday. Flag Day. It was also the birthday of Fighting Bob La Follette and Donald Trump.
What we found in our research, we start from three fundamental questions. One, will public education remain a public good that’s supported by the public through their tax dollars? Two, what do we do about the existing $1.2 trillion dollars in student loan debt and keep it from being $2 trillion by the end of the decade? And three, what are the economic ramifications if we don’t do anything?
That’s driven our program. From the research we’ve seen, two of the most acute impacts on purchasing for those who have student debt are new cars and homes, which are the embodiment of being the middle class. We go to college or we get technical college training so that we can get a good job and be in the middle class. If the entrance fee to that is decades of debt, I don’t know how we can sustain and have a middle class because we can’t make the basic purchases that drive our economy. But I’ll close with this. We have as a state deinvested in the money we give higher education. In 2000, ten cents of every tax dollar went into higher education. It’s now less than five. Fifteen years later, it’s less than five.
We can’t afford to not act, whether it is the notion of we’ve got to have higher education that’s affordable. And I certainly support free higher education. It’s the thing that drives our economy; education is what drives our economy. But I also think we need to do something about the existing debt. The challenge with the existing debt is basically there are two things to do: forgive it or let people refinance it. In Wisconsin, that’d be a $19 billion check. I don’t think the Legislature is going to write that check.
So we see the state version of refinancing as a solution, that also has challenges. Every single Democrat in the state Legislature is a co-author of that bill. There are no Republicans on it, and they keep nitpicking. It’s funny because whenever the bill comes up, they nitpick and say, “Hey your interest might not be 2 percent.” Listen, I had a 7.875 percent interest rate, so I spent $13.20 a day in interest. That drives my push for the idea that you should be able to refinance your student loan like you can a mortgage or a car loan.
Wagner: You’re talking about the Wisconsin student loan refinancing bill.
Ross: The “Higher Ed, Lower Debt” bill, yeah.
Goldrick-Rab: I’ll say something about that. In general terms, I completely support it. In general terms, of course it’s a good thing to do. There’s a but, though. The first thing is refinancing disproportionately helps people with bigger amounts of debt. You’re paying more interest because you have a bigger debt. People with bigger debt, for the most part, went to graduate school. They are relatively advantaged or they went to a private institution that charged a fortune. The people who, however, are defaulting on their loans did not. They are defaulting on their loans with very small amounts of debt. Refinancing does not help them very much.
If we were going to pick something that really went to where the people are literally locked out of the middle class, we would be going for loan forgiveness or Pell Grant recipients, who were never, ever supposed to have debt in the first place and have been completely betrayed by the whole system. We won’t get that because they’re poor people. We will get refinancing because it’s mainly the middle class.
What worries me about it is that we’ll do something for the middle class that won’t even really help the poor. My biggest concern is this: then the middle class will be quiet. What’s gotten people so angry and upset is this debt. And don’t take me wrong. I don’t want to keep people mad and in pain to get them to do something, but I am very worried that once they get their refinancing and they can comfortably make their payments again, they will basically sit back down, and this will stop being a voting issue. But we will not have solved anything. We will have to do this again for the next generation, and we will have moved to an entirely loan-financed model, which frankly, is what the Republicans are pushing for — and some Democrats.
That’s my worry about it. It’s not that I don’t like it. I’m worried about the ramifications of this, and I’m worried that I actually think it’s genuinely regressive.
Ross: One thing on that. It doesn’t cost anything. The state plan doesn’t cost taxpayers anything. It’s just basically buying loans and then coming up with what, through risk management, is the lowest interest rate possible. So the state doesn’t have to invest anything. But I totally get what you’re saying in terms of how do we keep the ball so we get as much, and we’re not negotiating from the middle. That’s one of the maddening things about the way the president negotiated health care. He started in the middle and we moved to a more conservative thing.
The challenge that I see with a lot of this is we can’t even get a vote on this. The U.S. Senate has blocked this. Several times the Republicans en masse have blocked Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Baldwin’s bill on refinancing. So it just seems that if it’s something that’s not for corporations, it’s going to be a real challenge in the state of Wisconsin and nationally.
Goldrick-Rab: The thing is, though, there has been a strategy in other states that is making progress. There are Republicans who are supporting free college in other places, number one. And number two, there were intelligent chancellors and presidents who went to Republicans and brought down tuition in exchange for in-state seats. So had I been your chancellor during the last negotiations — and I am not running for that — I would’ve been there from day one saying to the Legislature, “I know what you want. You want lower tuition and you want seats for in-state students. Let’s make a deal. I will expand the number of people arriving into this university, so that you can get in all those constituents, all over the state who you want to get in here. It’s really no skin off our backs. We are tiny compared to some of our peers, and we’re not growing.” And in exchange, I would’ve bought back my state appropriations. It’s interesting that the Republicans fall for that, but they do, all over the country.
But we didn’t do that. In fact, we did the complete opposite. We didn’t with the in-state issue, and then, as soon as we got our situation with our appropriation, we used that as an excuse to do exactly what we wanted to do all along, which is to go charge more to our out-of-state students and get to admit more of them. That’s the privatization of the university. That’s all kinds of messed up, and it’s not because there’s no solution with Republicans. We’re not playing well with them, too. That’s my take on it.
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Wagner: So who should students worried about their own debt or whether they can send their kids to college, who should they be talking to? Should it be administrators here on our campus? Should it be state lawmakers? The federal government seems pretty far away from Madison, Wisconsin. What should these people do?
Radomski: My personal viewpoint is let’s focus on the state, especially if you are from Stevens Point or Superior or other parts of the state outside of Dane County. There are many Republicans who did stand up, remember, for the UW Colleges. That’s the most open and low-tuition cost institution of higher ed in Wisconsin. So to answer your question, focus on folks throughout the state with their Assembly representatives and senators. And also focus on your chancellor, or your dean if it’s a UW College or a president if it’s a technical college.
The success that we’ve seen in other states, all these different Promise programs, like one in Oregon. There’s all these Promise programs where cities, villages, counties have partners either with their community colleges nearby or universities, and they bring the business community and the public and elected officials. And these programs are all different, of course. There are many that are much, much better than others. But in short, they work on policies and programs that, in effect, increase the diversity on campus. And it then finally addresses, instead of replicates, income inequality that we have in society. Because what’s going on now, especially at UW-Madison, is we’re replicating it, and it’s not contributing to income inequality. So I think the greatest effect you and I can have and parents and students can have is with people at the local level, who represent you in the statehouse.
Laning: I would say that first and foremost, students need to talk to students. The amount of people that I talk to that just either are totally oblivious to what they’re even paying for college, are either drowning in debt and just have given up and don’t know what else to do, and there’s only like a couple of students that are actually talking about it. Specifically at UW-Madison, only 50 percent of students here have debt, so actually getting out of that bubble and talking to other students across the state in other UW System schools, community colleges and technical colleges. Just talking to people that are in the two-year colleges and hearing how many of their chancellors are getting fired or laid off and how they’re consolidating, they’re losing entire programs, it’s just so much more than we’ll ever have in here. So getting out of that Madison bubble, as well, [is important].
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But my number one thing is by students talking to students, they’ll talk to their families, who then work in the businesses, who then are taxpayers, who then will be connected to the people of Wisconsin. And our administration is not at all thinking about that. And when I try to talk to our administrators, I don’t get much information at all. And our administrators and the UW System are doing these road shows and talking to CEOs of companies. They can decide to talk to five CEOs and hope that they donate enough money to our school to make up for it, or they can engage the over 200,000 students that are on all the different campuses and tell them what’s going on and explain what’s happening at our universities, and explain what’s being cut and that students are the ones that are making up for the cuts from the state, and then those students can bring that information back to their family, back to those businesses, and more people will know what’s going on.
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No one knows what’s going on right now. We hear about the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation-Apple lawsuit, and people think that’s somehow going to help our university. That’s not going to help us at all. Or the huge campaign we’re running, the 167 years that we’re going to be doing it, none of that is helping the university. There’s so many things that are happening starting with out-of-state students paying $3,000 more and international students paying $4,000 more. That argument was, “Oh, we need to be more like other Big Ten schools.” No. We need to make up for the budget cuts that we have. And that’s not being portrayed.
So every student walks around on our campus thinking, “Oh, we have all this money. Why are we actually doing bad?” And then legislators see, “Oh, you have all this money, why are you actually doing bad?” And next thing you know, we’re just getting cut even more, and there’s only a select few people that are actually frustrated by what’s happening. And there’s not enough information being spread to the rest of the people on campus, so no one knows how to react. So I think it really needs to be student-to-student, but primarily, the administration just needs to talk about what’s happening. That’s not there.
Wagner: It seems like some of you are talking about issues of shared governance. So the state made some pretty sharp changes to shared governance in the last several months. Have you all noticed changes in how your relationship has been with administrators?
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Goldrick-Rab: So I was the chair of the Committee on Undergraduate Recruitment, Admissions and Financial Aid, and I’ve been on it basically since I’ve been here, for 11 years. That’s the shared governance committee that is supposed to be making serious contributions to the discussion of who attends here, how they get here, how they’re admitted and what money they have. That committee was not consulted about the change to out-of-state students. Not even consulted. Wasn’t even told.
On Monday, the University Committee is going to have a discussion with the chancellor about changing the committee, and its charge and who’s on it. The committee was not told that. The search for the financial aid director — we currently do not have one — was called a failed search with no explanation to the committee, and they’re reconstituting the position description for the financial aid officer.
The chancellor also announced in the last couple of months that she intends to start providing merit-based aid to out-of-state students. This is money for you when you don’t have financial need. I understand it’s nice to get it. Research shows it’s a complete waste. It actually fuels the car industry because people who get the money already can afford things and buy their kids cars. There’s a new study that actually shows that it contributes to a decrease in the production of STEM degrees in states. It’s a total waste of resources. She’s not going to hear any of this because she doesn’t even go to the committee, and they’re going to change the purpose of the committee.
So shared governance was actually gotten rid of in state law this summer — again, things people don’t know about. And she said she was going to uphold it. But in the wake of it being gone, she has not only not upheld it, she’s thumbed her nose at it. Very similar to post-Act 10, where she said she was going to uphold the rights of the TAA, the Teaching Assistants’ Association, when she has just blatantly violated their contract and all of their negotiations and is changing the rules on what they’re getting paid. This is happening all over the place. There’s no shared governance. There’s fake shared governance, just like there’s fake tenure.
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Laning: First, I want to point out that the University Committee is a Faculty Senate executive committee. They interact with our administration weekly, and the administration are supposed to do special things with hiring, and there are special things that faculty do with our administration that other groups are not usually part of. But at the same time, meeting weekly, there isn’t things to be updated on every single time.
So the University Committee has kind of turned into the university shared governance committee. If I tell this group what’s happening, then it’s shared governance. And that’s the biggest concern that we as students have. When talking to the chancellor and the dean of students and being like, “This isn’t really a University Committee. We should have a University Committee that has students, faculty, staff on it if we’re going to have such a body.”
Especially with the non-residential waiver thing, we as students met with UW Communications the day before it was released and were not told what was happening. I even explicitly asked about a rumor I heard that the chancellor may be increasing out-of-state tuition cap, can you tell me anything about that? And they kind of gave us this long, rambly answer without actually answering it, and the next thing we know, it’s being waived. And the chancellor said she consulted the University Committee, and they met over the summer and students aren’t here over the summer. That was really frustrating for students to just be dismissed to the side.
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We’ve been told that we can attend University Committee meetings and if we raise our hands, we’ll be called on, but in the true state of shared governance, it’s not about raising hands and being called on. It’s quorum, it’s taking notes, it’s being there and having your voice heard. And it’s systematically not happening anymore on our campus because of the changes.
I think that even with University Committee, I think it does put a lot of the faculty in the committee in a weird place in that they are being consulted with a lot of information that other groups aren’t getting, but how can we change that, then? If every shared governance group is expected to be there, what does that actually mean? And what does that mean for the 75 other shared governance committees that we have on campus, if there’s only one that’s really making all the decisions? I think it’s slowly chipping away, and the non-residential waiver was one small, but very large thing to show that there really isn’t shared governance anymore on campus.
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Goldrick-Rab: For those who were not here, there’s a really good example of what the problem is also with the University Committee. Several years ago, the then-chancellor, Biddy Martin, decided that she and Gov. Walker should work together to break UW-Madison off from the UW System. She went to the University Committee, told them about this and then swore them so secrecy. And it had to come out in a regents meeting that the head of the University Committee briefly came out and stated that she had been told by the chancellor to not say anything.
The independence, in other words, of the University Committee from the administration has been called into question many, many times. And PROFS, which is the lobbying arm of the faculty, is run by the University Committee. In other words, they’ve got hands in too many different places. There’s no independence in this sense. Not only that, but there’s no staff and no students on there. And why would you have these committees of experts on these topics if you were just going to make all the decisions? Plus they’re not even being consulted. They’re being told.
Laning: It’s just like a change in communication. I attended the University Committee meeting the Monday after the non-residential announcement, and the chancellor sat there and straight out said, “We have these budget cuts. We have these holes. We really need to fill them. This is one of the ways I can do so.” Later that day, there was a Faculty Senate meeting, I went to that. And she kind of touched a little bit on that, but it wasn’t really explicitly talked about. It was kind of like, “This will be good for the university.”
And then moving to the Board of Regents meeting that happened the Friday after, the budget wasn’t even mentioned. It now became a talent development initiative that was going to help bring more talent to our university. It was going to bring more of the Wisconsin high schoolers that are leaving our state back to our university. So just looking at that progression of a message and who’s actually getting the story of what is happening versus what’s the general public hearing about what’s happening on campus. It’s really concerning moving forward with the state of the university.
Q: One question I have would be to Scot, your group talks a lot about student loan voters and you have this huge list on your website outlining people from all over the country signing onto that. What are the chances that this is an issue people will vote on?
Ross: I would say a couple of things. One is, when you look at the number of people who have student loan debt, 43 million. There are 55 million people who get Social Security and 47 million who get Medicare. So you see how vast that population is. We want to basically create an AARP for student loan borrowers because you all have been sold a bill of goods.
I think the most irritating phrase in the English language is, “Well, when I went to college,” which is usually followed up by, “I worked flipping hamburgers and paid my tuition for the year.” That simply doesn’t exist anymore. My mom used to use that with me, although she worked in the Butler mushroom mine with lady convicts over the summer, which is the largest mushroom mine in North America. So I think that’s what it is. it comes down to, whether it’s in the state of Wisconsin our outside of the state of Wisconsin, we are not meeting the obligation that we have to young people and people who need training to provide them that opportunity. And I think you all could have an enormous voice for what you’re being denied, which is the opportunity to have a quality public education at a quality public university without decades of debt and without having to fight with 50 students in a room for classrooms of 25.
I think about the student who grows up outside of, say, Eau Claire, or in Kewaunee County, who wants to go to a University of Wisconsin school. There’s an enormous pride in that. I’m originally from Pittsburgh, and I’m from the University of Pittsburgh, the first university west of the Allegheny Mountains. And it was a cool school, but there’s a reason why the gang down the street at Carnegie Mellon referred to us as grade 13.
I’ve lived in a number of places over the country, but I’ve never seen the pride for a university system that exists here in the state of Wisconsin. And after having now lived here 20 years, it breaks my heart to think that somebody who grows up on a farm outside of Kewaunee or outside of Eau Claire or something is going to be denied a seat in the UW System because an out-of-state student can gouge so much. It’s part of their new business model, to get more out-of-state students, specifically because you can charge them more, and I think that’s appalling.
Q: So what’s the next move for students once this in-state tuition freeze is over? What do they need to do? Who do they go to? How do they mobilize? Is there even anything they can do?
Radomski: I think following student leadership across the state is where it has to begin. We already have leaders like Madison and others doing that. In addition to that, we need to work with alumni chapters. They’re in almost every county in the state, and those individuals are 20 to 90 years old, and they’re very involved in churches in community events, nonprofits and elected offices. You’ve got already a political base. The question then becomes, “What do you want to advocate? And what do you think can be done given the politics of our state?”
Even Gov. Walker said recently in response to the student debt issue that One Wisconsin Now has put on the front, he even said, “I’m going to work on something, and I’m going to introduce it at the State of the State.” So the point of that is the window is short because my prediction is if we stay on the sidelines and wait for him to come out, I would predict it’s going to be merit-based aid.
It’s not going to address the issues that we talk about. It’s not going to help the kids in Kewaunee. It’s not going to help the kids in Eau Claire, who want to either start at UW-Marathon County and then transfer to Stevens Point or to UW-Madison. I think what we have to do is develop a coalition, and it’s too bad that Democrats don’t understand what the hell to do. Just think about it. All the people in Wisconsin that are upset. You’ve got folks who like to fish, people who like to hunt, people who like schools, people who like colleges, people who like good government, open government.
That crosses the Democrat, independent and even into the moderate Republican line. So the question becomes, “Can we create a coalition?” Damn right we can. It’s been done before. But what are we going to advocate for? And I think to Sara’s point, we’ve got to be strategic. Which students and prospective students who will become students need the most help? And which graduates need the most help?
Goldrick-Rab: UW-Madison is best helped by not making it all about UW-Madison. That is the way to help yourself. The way to help yourself is to go get with everybody else. The Legislature is not a fan of this institution. They actually don’t have that many problems with the rest of the institutions, not that I can tell. And if you wait, that’s also a problem.
So the time to do something about your future tuition increases is now, and the way to do it is to get educated now. I don’t understand why higher ed policy isn’t taught to every undergrad in this campus. I teach it to undergrads. The people who come out of there know something about this topic. They make much more educated decisions, and they’re much more strategic. I think that there should be every student out there trying to figure out how to get educated on a topic, reading about it to the extent that they can. They should be talking to their families. They should be mobilizing the Wisconsin Alumni Association.
And there’s one other thing that I just have to say, and I don’t love this program, but it’s your only option right now. Income-based repayment. This is the way to do the best that you can with your current student loans, and work on lobbying to make the terms better. The terms should be better. But it is one thing that is available, and the take-up rate is incredibly low, which means that students are not using it who really should be in it.
If you’re in income-based repayment and you don’t have any money, and you show them that you don’t have any money, you will not default on your loans. The problem that you have is that people don’t know about it, so they don’t put themselves in it. And you have to keep showing the government what you have each year, your income, in order to get the right situation for yourself. And people have a hard time doing that.
But I think it would be good for students to tell other students in whatever game of telephone you want to play that income-based repayment is really important. It’s the only part of the loan counseling discussion that I think has some merit, because it’s the only band-aid right now that’s already available with federal loans. And that’s why you should never take a private loan.
Ross: The reason I have some experience with this is the person who sits next to me in the office was doing income-based repayment for like five years and has more debt now. But it shows that — the Obama administration, which was trying to do something, was basically putting in place a system that allowed students less likelihood of being victimized by the same federal government.
And that’s one of the things you’ve got to remember about this. The profitability of it, in 2013, the federal government made $51 billion off the interest from student loans, which is larger than the largest corporation in America, ExxonMobil made. They made a paltry $46 billion. That’s why, when I’m talking to legislators, and they’re like, “I don’t know if we can do this refinance plan. It’s going to cost us too much money,” I say it’s impossible for them to lose money on giving people loans because the basic nature of interest is that you pay back more than you put in. So I think that’s one of the frustrations for me.
It’s almost like they’re being intentionally obtuse. Because I don’t think they give a damn about you guys. And you know why they don’t? Because it’s so hard to get you out to vote. Let’s all be adults here and talk about it. Eighteen months into the election cycle, they start saying, “How are we going to turn students out?” Whether it’s Democrats who tend to talk about abortion and gay rights to get you out to the polls and Republicans, which I’m not sure what they talk about to get you out to the polls. Apparently you’re not adult enough to have an economic discussion that’s going to drive you out to the polls.
Politicians understand two things. They understand that politics is about motion, and they understand the use of force. And you, as a voting block, could utilize that force to get whatever you wanted. Some of these elections in places are decided by 30 and 40 votes. And then you’ll see that only 22 percent of the campus turned out for these elections. You could have so much influence, not just here in Madison but all across the state. It’s ripe for the picking.
But I also understand that you guys have the same struggle that other people, which is, you’ve got lives to live and sometimes you don’t see what is the benefit of voting. You want to amass power, vote as a bloc, make them listen to you. That’s my advice, and I’d say that whether you’re Democrats or Republicans because Republicans and Democrats have equal right to try to get their policies put in. So if you’re Republican go out and vote en masse and tell them why. If you’re Democrat, do the same. But make sure you go out and vote because otherwise, that’s why they don’t listen to you.
Goldrick-Rab: Because this is a university I’m going to do the gray thing and make it a little grayer. Scot and I disagree on some things. We agree on the really important stuff. We disagree a little bit. I’m very worried about the message that the government is profiting off student loans. And let me tell you why. There is a very strong anti-government message out there. It’s being used to destroy lots of things. It’s being used right now by the Republican Party to try to destroy the U.S. Department of Education, which they do not think should exist.
They also would like to end the federal involvement in the student loan program, which might make you think that you won’t have loans. That’s not true. That’s the complete opposite of truth. Prior to the federal government originating student loans, the banks made student loans. The banks really enjoyed doing this, because they got paid to do this and they made a bunch of money doing it. By taking the banks out of the middle, by the government deciding it could finally afford [this], it was a big calculation. Can we actually afford to originate them ourselves or do need to keep paying banks to do this? By doing that the government actually got enough resources to pay for Pell Grant program, which is a very important program. That’s what they used the money to do.
If we kill federal involvement in the student loan program, it will go back to the banks. The problem I have with the profiting off of loans [message is that] it is fueling a whole bunch of Republican [efforts] to get the government out of making those loans. It’s helping them. I understand it’s a Democratic talking point, because they want to make it better. But it’s actually helping the right in terms of getting rid of the entire federal program. And the accounting question of whether it’s a profit or not, is actually an accounting questions. It’s difficult. I’m not a defender. I want it to be lower. But I also do know that governments don’t make profits. Governments reinvest the money. And the money is going into the Pell Grant. That’s where it is going.
Ross: Some of it is. They put $20 billion into a debt reduction.
Goldrick-Rab: But some of the money. It’s important that we understand that a government doesn’t make profit, this is not, the student loan program is not a finance product. We cannot understand is as a finance product. It is a government college access program. We make loans that we otherwise would never make to very risky people who we think will not pay them back, namely African Americans for the number one most important thing.
If the federal government gets taken out of this and/or a whole bunch of Democrats oddly enough convince them that they’re making risky loans, and they could offer you a reduced rate on your loans by not making those risky loans, then they’re going to introduce underwriting, which means that African Americans all over this country are not going to get access to those loans.
So there’s this very complicated politics underneath this where we get this unintended consequence that I am so worried about. Because basically we will have been pushing for something that looks good for the general folks but ends up undermining either the Pell program and/or access of African American families to loans. And when they started to cut them off at the Parent Plus program, which lots of people say it’s not financial aid. Well the enrollment, college enrollment, nationwide of African Americans dropped that year. And it was the Obama administration that did that. It wasn’t Republicans that did it. They did it because they thought it was good intentions and they thought they were helping families avoid bad loans. And they undercut college enrollment of a very vulnerable group. That’s why higher ed policy is so complicated.
Radomski: I’ll say something that people on this campus won’t like but if I were to advocated for what should be done in Wisconsin, what I said earlier, what Scot and Madison and Sara said as well, but I would also say that the allocation from the state to the UW System and then the UW System to the campuses, much less should be coming to UW-Madison. Because all of the other institutions do not have alternative revenue sources. Talking about $80 million that comes from WARF. Talking about the $5 billion endowment at UW Foundation. No other university or UW’s college campuses have those two elements. They have tuition and they have state revenue.
So at UW-Madison, we should be taking less money from the state. Because we have alternative revenue sources.
Goldrick-Rab: But only if the money we don’t take goes to somebody else. That’s the problem with politics. We don’t want them to just keep it.
Radomski: I’ll say one other thing. That is, to Sara’s point, I agree. We should increase the number of Wisconsin residents coming to our campus. And I would also decrease the number of non-resident domestic students. What that means is we would increase the number of international students. We live in a global society. We’re a research university that does that around the state, the country and beyond. So if we want more Wisconsin residents because we’re the land grant institutions, let’s bring in more international students, let’s reduce the number of non-residents from the United States and let’s also increase the number of transfer students from Wisconsin.
What did the chancellor say just recently? That we’re going to increase the number of non-resident transfer students. That’s the joy of the state of Wisconsin. We’ve had a rich history of students transferring from either the technical college liberal arts programs or UW-Marathon County, UW-Barron County, Nicolet and Rhinelander, UW-Stevens Point. So my point is what UW-Madison is and is becoming is the University of Michigan at Madison. That is what’s happening at UW-Madison. What we are doing on this campus is we should call ourselves the University of Michigan at Madison. Because that’s exactly what we’re doing, and that’s the path we’re taking, and we have to reverse it. We’ve got to say we’re actually the University of Wisconsin, not the University of Michigan, and we are part of the UW System, and people will listen from other parts of the state.
Laning: For me, it is important to note, even when the non-resident thing was happening, we had a representatives meeting, which is like the student body presidents of all the UW schools. And people were saying without as many in-state students at UW-Madison, all the UW schools will be able to fill their enrollment. So just the ideology that people have in this state of who can go to college and who can’t go to college and who we’re allowing to go to these institutions needs to change. Because people think there’s a stagnant number of people who can go into higher education when in reality there’s just increasing tuition costs that are causing more people to not even apply.
We heard at an admissions thing at UW-Madison that we’re also going to maybe move to the common app. And it kind of sounds like it’s already been decided. I probably wouldn’t have even applied here. I didn’t even fill out the common app. That’s just making our institution so much more elite than all the other. Biddy Martin came up with the idea of breaking the UW-Madison away, and it kind of seems like we’re slowly getting back to that ideology of making Madison this elite place.
I can tell you when the tuition freeze is over, there’s going to be the argument that out-of-state students are paying too much compared to in-state students, so in-state’s going to skyrocket. And that’s going to be reasoning, that it’s unfair that these out-of-state students are paying so much more, and in-state students are going to be making up that. And with the conversations that we have with legislators, the sad reality is we just need new legislators. Most legislators, as much as you want to appeal to them, they have an idea in their brain of what the institution is going to look like, and they’re making sure that it becomes that. And the only way to really change that is get new legislators.
And after Act 10, there’s not a single thing that really any Democrat or Republican will vote on together. And we’ve talked with Democrats. and they talk horribly about every Republican, and you talk to Republicans and they talk horribly about every Democrat, and there’s no way to get anyone to actually work together, and that’s the only way we can actually fix education. Because Democrats are able to sit on the side and just be really angry all the time because they know they’re not going to change anything, but then they’re not actually coming up with really that many solutions either. So there needs to be new people in the Capitol to come up with solutions to the problem instead of just arguing about them all the time.
Goldrick-Rab: And you guys know about the box that’s on job applications? About how people can’t get jobs because people have to check this box that says they’ve had a felony conviction. We know about racial discrimination, right? You know what’s on the common app? That box. She’s come forward twice and said she wants the common app, and this has been mentioned both times. So we can actually see who has that history. And we can utilize that information in our admissions decisions. The entire rest of the country is going the opposite direction, and understands that we don’t want to have more racial disparities.
Lanning: And even when they say income-blind apps, it’s not income-blind at all. And when you look at how many activities that someone did throughout high school, did they have a job? Did they not have a job? There’s a legacy star, so my parents went here so I had a little star on my application that says my parents went here, there’s many other factors within our applications that show how much money someone has, and the argument that by increasing out-of-state students we’re going to increase diversity. Yeah, we may increase geographic diversity, but not much of anything else, and it’s not really helping the university or students.
Q: Coming back to just looking at student debt, it sounds like it’s just an income-based repayment or some other type of refinancing. And every time I’ve looked at refinancing, it’s always “get your minimum payment loan, so you can pay less each month,” but then you’re going to be paying longer. And you’re going to be paying more in the long run. I did the math on my minimums, if I was to pay that off at minimum rate for however long it takes, it would be fifty percent more that what I cost in tuition. Is there any look or any thought to lowering the interest rate? A lot of mine average out to about 6 percent.
Ross: I mean it’s insane that you have to pay that much. When other loans are much less. My car loan was so much less.
Audience: Even my base line refinancing. You can refinance your student loans for 3.78 variable, versus a car for 2.
Radomski: I took a look at what other states are doing. So in Connecticut they have the CHSLA, the Connecticut Higher Education Supplemental Loan Authority. And people get a fixed rate loan of 4.95 percent. You don’t have to be a resident of Connecticut, if you are. you’re eligible, but if you’re not a resident but you’re attending college or university in Connecticut, you can get it. So, Rhode Island, they have the Rhode Island Student Loan Authority, and they do not only student loans at a lower interest rate than what you described but they also have loan counseling, they have wrap-around services to help address or identify opportunities so you’re not spreading over 20 years.
Those are just two examples of using the bonding authority. So I think it goes to what Sara said, and what we’ve talked about, is what are the priorities? What are the interventions, for lack of a better word, what are the policies that we want to pursue. Because you can’t ask for three or four things. We aren’t going to get it, given the makeup of and the partisanship in the Legislature and the governor’s office.
So what is it? I think it’s, like I said, at the federal level, creating that “Maintenance of Effort.” At at the state level, focusing on state need-based aid and at the institutional level, need-based aid. Because unfortunately what’s going on with the other universities, with UW-Stevens Point, and I looked today at the Stevens Point Journal today online, and they’re voting, the students are voting on tuition differentiation at UW-Stevens Point. Which is what we did with the Madison Initiative for Undergraduates. Meaning the students vote to increase their tuition.
So this private sector model is now spreading, which is a very dangerous thing because then you start looking at inequities. Who’s going to start attending and who’s not going to attend. It becomes a choice of where you’re going, and as Sara said it ultimately becomes a choice of not going. And then we are not only replicating inequalities in society, we’re making it worse.
Ross: I think we should remember where we’re at, you know, five years into the current administration we’ve seen $700 million taken from the UW and the tech colleges. We saw 38,000 eligible students lose financial aid last year and 41,000 the year before, if my figures are correct. And I believe it was an 11% tuition increase.
My real concern with the tuition is the last two times there was a one year tuition freeze, there was an immediate double-digit increase in tuition. Are there any seniors in the room? You guys are fine. The rest of you are just going to get socked in the jaw something fierce. And I think if Gov. Walker figured he wasn’t going to be around for that, but it turns out after the 71-day campaign, he actually might still be around for the next budget. And they refer to the budget, and I know we’re adults, but it’s the “crap budget.” This thing is going to be a disaster this next one, because again, we’re not making progress in terms of the job creation. And the spending power which can create jobs and create the opportunity so we have more tax dollars to put into things like higher education, which I put at the very top of our priorities. Public education, K-12 and higher education should be our top priorities as a state, in my opinion.
Wagner: We’ve kind of reached the end of our night but I think before we go, our panelists talked a lot about a lot of things that ought to make people angry and ought to make people interested in participating. But one last question for you all: We’ve talked about a lot of things that have revealed deep problems that in many ways continue to cause the worst problems for the people that we’re supposed to be lifting up in the first place. So my last question, and maybe it’s the Minnesotan in me, but what gives you hope?
Ross: I think that on the progressive side, we might be getting to the point where there’s going to be some new and younger leadership, which I think will put people more in tune with this crisis of higher education, affordable education. I mean the Democrats have a couple presidential candidates, obviously, who have never really experienced the notion of student loan debt because they’re septuagenarians. Same with the septuagenarians who are leading Congress for the Democrats, that being Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Jim Clyburn, all literal septuagenarians.
And that’s not to say because someone’s older they don’t have a commitment to higher education, I would not say that. But that sort of tangible hitting you where it hurts, if you have had to make choices for 12 months a year for 26 years of what I’m going to spend and what I can’t spend, based on your student debt, and I’m talking about my own experience. And I’m luckier than most. I have a good paying job, I’ve never missed a payment, I was always able to make those payments so I am lucky. But my story shouldn’t be the success story, that I was able to pay my $460 a month for 26 years. I mean come on. I went to Pitt, grade 13. Grad school really did get me though, for sure. And thank you to the University of Wisconsin for rejecting me from my PhD, because God knows, I never would have finished, and I probably still would be paying debt decades from now.
Laning: I think it is a little hopeful to have conversations with other students that are passionate about this, but then I still live with all engineers, and they really don’t care about anything related to higher education that much, and they have jobs that pay $20 an hour and co-ops and this wonderful life ahead of them. So I think hearing from other students that in different fields gives me some hope that it’s not all students that are experiencing this bad thing. But at the same time that’s not helpful at all because there are a lot of students that are being kicked out. I think seeing when the Wisconsin Idea was kind of ditched last year, and how much people rallied around that.
I’m a true believer in over half the students on our campus don’t experience the Wisconsin Experience, and if people were to start talking about that and start trying to mobilize around that. Everything that we consider the Wisconsin Experience is just money, and how much money you have and how much you can use that money to have a Wisconsin Experience, and I think if students were to just start talking and continue those conversations, we could make change. But I’m not a very optimistic person, so there’s not much hope that I have.
Radomski: For me, I’m a Wisconsin kid. So I look at the history of Wisconsin. And Scot, you know this, as well, even though you’re from further east. We had an oligarchy form of government, in the 1890s, the Gilded Age. And then Robert M. La Follette became governor. Why I say that is because I’m fairly moderate and reasonable and I believe we have an oligarchy now, in 2015. Also with a Republican. Robert La Follette was a progressive Republican, but he was in the Republican Party.
So my point is, you’ve got to think beyond higher ed. Even though the topic is higher ed, we have to go beyond that. And like I said earlier, I think finally there’s enough people that have seen the actions by the governor and Legislature, from hunting to fishing, with the environment regulations, which the independents and the white males in Wisconsin who historically vote for Republicans. I’m hopeful because we’ve had that major swing. And I understand that with gerrymandering and redistricting, it’s going to be more challenging. But I think if we work with students around the state, and we work with non-students around the state, it’s not going to happen in one or two years, but I have hope because the state has made a significant change. And we can do it again. But we can’t do this in an island.
Goldrick-Rab: You have hope because you have no choice. It’s not option. It truly isn’t. Unless you just want to give up and lay down. Fighters win. In February 2014, I got up and gave a paper in D.C. among my peers, all of whom laughed at me, because I got up and said college should be free. They all laughed at me. Absolutely, in a very public audience on a very public stage, I got all the little smirks and all the little ‘there she goes,’ and at the end of that meeting I walked across the street and I met with the domestic policy council of the White House. And they smiled nicely when I told them college should be free. And then I went on my way. And I didn’t do anything with them for six months. And then one day I got a phone call. “He’s interested.”
This January, the president of the United States got up and put the words free and college together in the same sentence. Is it done? No. But who the heck saw that coming? It took 80 years to make high school free. This past week, Alabama launched a free college initiative. And not only for young kids to help them go to college, but for their parents to go to college. It’s called a dual-generation model and it brings an double return on investment.
Radomski: In the black belt as they call it, with the highest rate of poverty.
Goldrick-Rab: Exactly. In a place where they’ve never invested in state need-based aid. Alabama, Indiana, Oregon, Minnesota, Chicago, Milwaukee. It’s not just Bernie Sanders. And even it it was, that’s a good start. This thing has been going on for less than a couple of years, and look how far we’ve got. I have a five year old. I have an eight year old. I promised my five year old, by the time you go to college, community college will be free. I actually think we can deliver on that. So what the heck? Why sit down? Why not get back up and fight? And critique is a good thing. I say that because around here you hear critique of Madison, and people tell you they don’t love the place. James Baldwin said this the best. Critique is the highest form of love. If we didn’t love the place, we would not be sitting here. He spent his entire career here. This is my first and only job I’ve had here, and if we had tenure, I’d be staying. This is love, to fight for a place. To do anything else is just not an option.
