By David Conde
I started my college career while in the United States Air Force stationed in Wiesbaden, Germany. I attended the General H H Arnold High School classes at night offered by the University of Maryland University College.
My tuition at the time was largely paid by the military. There were several terms that I attended full time taking a 12 hour load by going to school 3 hours a night, 4 nights a week.
After I did my time and got ready to leave the service, I inquired about educational support and benefits as a veteran. Although there was talk about opportunities, the Cold War GI Bill did not become law until after I finished undergraduate school and public financial aid did not exist.
So I worked at night cleaning offices and attended college at first the University of Denver and later the University of Northern Colorado. Traveling to Greeley to go to school every day was a 120 mile round trip that could not be sustained.
On my way back, on a Thursday, I took a cold medicine, fell asleep, hit a bridge and went into a river in Commerce City. My car was totaled but the injuries were not severe enough to prevent me from continuing my studies. They were serious enough however, so that my mom got very angry and drove me to the university to talk to the Dean of Students about my near death experience and demanded that something be done. As a result, I got a $1,000 loan that together with part-time work at the University helped get me through to graduation.
I began paying off that loan to its totality after graduate school. In addition, I accumulated another $11K in loans for my graduate program and was prepared to begin paying them off when it was announced that by virtue of being a professor I was eligible to have a 10 percent reduction of my loans per year for 5 years as long as I was in the teaching profession.
Over the following years since, I saw the floodgates of college financial aid open up to the point that it began to complicate student lives after graduation. The out of control rise in tuition, fees and books along with poor academic counseling and bad course choices extended the time of study and drastically increased the cost of a college education.
The value of college study continues to be primary to building a competitive human resource and workforce. However, its costs have spiraled over the decades and are now critically unacceptable.
The tuition and fees need to become reasonable. In the absence of that, a bailout for student debt, especially for those that do not have sufficient resources, is the most immediate solution.
This is not really a new phenomenon as after all, just in the 21st Century, a bailout of corporations came about because of the great recession, the mostly 1 percent of the richest corporations and individuals got a significant income tax rate cut that represents trillions of dollars and COVID-19 caused the government to pump trillions more into the public and private sectors to avoid a recession because businesses could not operate in that environment.
This crisis requires a comparatively more moderate solution for individuals that accumulate debt beyond their means in order to prepare for work. This together with free attendance at community colleges represents the beginning of policy solution.
Affordable college study opportunity is very necessary. Creating debt accumulation that threatens the middle class is not.
The views expressed by David Conde are not necessarily the views of la Voz bilingüe. Comments and responses may be directed to News@lavozcolorado.com.
