The U. S. Supreme Court is mulling over the arguments surrounding President Biden’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 of federal student loan debt. The consumer credit reporting bureau Experian’s 2022 data showed student loan borrowers had an average loan balance of $39,487 in 2021 and a total balance of $1.59 trillion. Nearly a quarter of borrowers owe more than $50,000.

How did college get so expensive in the first place?

Dr. Stephen Pruitt is president of the Southern Regional Education Board, a non-partisan and non-profit 16-state interstate compact which works to improve education at every level. He estimates since the 1980s, college tuition has tripled, thanks to several contributing factors, though the rate of growth has slowed a bit since the Great Recession.

“State legislatures tended to put a little more funding toward public colleges and universities, and over time, we’ve seen that decline. Inflation, of course, has an impact, as it does on everything. You also see where the cost of salaries--the cost of having more and more qualified and renowned professors to be able to provide that instruction--continues to grow,” Pruitt tells WSB.

He says amenities and student resources, buildings, technology and Internet, and laboratory courses are other areas of growing expenses for colleges.

Only the most affluent families will pay a college’s sticker price--the cost before any financial aid like grants or scholarships. The remaining students will pay the net price. But Pruitt points out the higher the sticker price, the harder it is to get the net price into an affordable range, particularly for first-generation college students.

Even if colleges were more transparent about where the money from tuition and fees is going, Pruitt believes it might be helpful to some but confusing to others. Without “clear, common-people language” detailing what the costs are, “I think people get real skeptical when they see a bill that says ‘Fees,’” he says.

Yet Dr. Pruitt says more than ever, the engine to a better economy is college--or some form of higher education.

“When I say college, I want to be clear: I’m talking about community college, technical college, access to industry certifications or credentials that really we see at this point everybody is going to need.

“Realizing that we are in this Fourth Industrial Revolution, a high school diploma can’t be a terminal degree,” says Pruitt. “If a high school diploma is a terminal degree, it will literally be terminal for that student’s opportunities going forward.”

Pruitt cites an SREB estimate that due to developments in automation and artificial intelligence in the southern region, there may be as many as 18 million unemployable adults by 2030.

Ignoring college affordability, he says, will have an outsized effect on our economy.

“We’ve probably all been to restaurants already where the ordering was done on a giant iPad. There are pizza places employing robots that can make three times the number of pizzas in an hour than a human. My wife and I have even eaten at a restaurant where a robot delivered the food to the table,” says Pruitt.

The Georgia native who spent some years of his early career teaching in Fayette County says there needs to be more counseling of students as early as middle school but at least by high school to consider the education-to-career pipeline: What careers are out there, and if you’re taking out student debt to land that job, how quickly can you repay it, if at all?

With so many colleges and universities in the country, though, why doesn’t competition from such a plentiful market drive tuition costs down instead of up?

The lure of a marquee name is powerful for many students and their families, whether it’s the recently two-time national champion University of Georgia or an Ivy League university. Pruitt says the appeal of admission into a school with such selectivity plays into some people’s way of thinking. Too, he adds that our culture still has an unfortunate holdover of an idea that there’s a lesser value to career, technical, or agricultural education--a stigma that those schools and careers are for people who “can’t” do a traditional four-year college degree.

But many of the in-demand fields which risk being understaffed by 2030 are in those very CTAE (Career, Technical and Agricultural Education) fields, says Pruitt.

“As parents and schools, we have to start realizing there’s no shame, and there’s no particular honor if you’re going to a four-year vs. a two-year,” says Pruitt. “The bottom line is, are you happy? And are you going to be able to contribute to the workforce and the economy?”

So, Pruitt contends, the market doesn’t drive down prices because not every school offers the same shared product.

Tuition at America’s most expensive colleges runs well over $75,000 per year.

Is the priciest college degree worth that much more than one that’s a fraction of the cost?

“We’re not always coaching people well on, don’t just look at the name,” Pruitt says. “You’ve got to look at what you’re going to get out of it.

“I’m going to pay this large amount of money because I want the brand, I want the whatever, but when it comes down to what is my career going to be, if I’m not going to have enough money in my career to pay that off, at that point, was it really worth it?”

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