The High Cost of Higher Education
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to participate in what the state legislature calls the "2008 Workforce Congress." The concept was to bring together a wide range of people who have a vested interested in seeing North Dakota create policies that will attract and retain workers at all levels.
The legislative interim committee called The Workforce Committee is chaired by State Senator Tony Grindberg (R-Fargo) and put this conference together. Last year, Sen. Grindberg sponsored a bill called The North Dakota Promise. It was a commendable effort, and the first real attempt by a Republican in North Dakota to address the growing problem of the rising price of tuition to the individual student.
However, like the mostly-Democratic Youth Initiative of 2002, this plan was simply another handout to subsidize the price of tuition to the student. It did nothing to address the underlying causes that are creating hyper-inflation in the cost of higher education.
Recent graduates are not looking for handouts. In North Dakota, the average college graduate leaves school with $23,000 worth of student debt, and this doesn't even cover the credit card debt most students graduate with when the loans and grants aren't enough to cover basic living expenses.
When a college graduate racks up this much debt for their education they really are only looking for two things: a job for which they can use their degree and a job that will pay what they can make somewhere else. They aren't looking for a hand-out. They just really want a decent job in their field of study.
While it is apparent that Sen. Grindberg and others have their hearts in the right place. The suggestions created by this 'Workforce Congress' such as totally state funded K-12 education and free college education are simply bailouts to a system that has become top-heavy and bloated with administration.
In K-12 Education, we have seen a drastic 20% decline of enrollment over the last 10-15 years, while per pupil spending on K-12 education has more than doubled after taking into account inflation even since I was in school. This is a situation that must be explained - even with rising energy costs, why does it cost twice as much in real dollars to educate students as it did when I was in the 7th grade in 1995?
In higher education, the number of North Dakota high school graduates continues to decline and the state's policy has been to further subsidize the educations of non-residents with the unintended consequence of higher tuition rates for North Dakotans.
North Dakota University System figures show that 2/3rds of North Dakotans that attend college in-state stay in North Dakota and that 1/3rd of non-resident who attend college here also stay. Perhaps an official study into whether subsidized tuition reciprocity agreements are actually doing what they are intended to do, or if best they are resulting in a zero-sum conclusion on the population side of thing at the cost of higher tuition for residents.
Another area that should be examined is the way the Bank of North Dakota treats the student loans as a revenue stream for the state. With the fact that North Dakota graduates have some of the highest debt rates in the nation, is it even ethical for the Bank of North Dakota to profit to the tune of $30 million each biennium based on the interest of student loans? Do we really want to have a State Bank that profits from the debt of its citizens?
Collectively, we can all come up with as many schemes to bribe young people to stay as there are hours in the day. But until we fix policies that are preventing us from retaining those young people that are already here, it doesn't matter what new policies we come up with. Let's start looking at the policies and programs we already have to determine if they are working or making the problem worse. Once that has happened, then we can look at new and creative ways of dealing with the situation.
Dustin Gawrylow, State Policy Director
Americans for Prosperity of North Dakota
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