A New G.I. Bill?
By Kay Steiger - Jan 26th, 2009 at 12:50 pmThere’s an op-ed this morning in Inside Higher Ed by Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, that proposes a “new G.I. Bill” for “low-income Americans who attend college at dramatically lower rates than their fellow citizens and middle- and upper-middle-class populations for whom the cost of college is growing far faster than their paychecks.”
The framework is gimmicky, but this op-ed points out a basic fact: the cost of college is simply rising too quickly for many students to effectively adapt to the changes. They often end up compensating by taking on far more debt than they can realistically pay back. Rather than pouring all this money into scholarships, perhaps we should look at ways to lower the cost of tuition.
It’s true that the G.I. Bill was originally designed to house veterans upon their return from World War II. It was the most efficient way to create a training program for veterans, many of whom went straight from high school to the war. But it seems weird to propose a “civilian G.I. Bill” to low-income students, middle-class students, and upper-middle-class students. It sounds like we’re giving everyone a G.I. Bill. So I think Levine was really getting at the idea that college is expensive–unfairly so. We should look for ways to mitigate costs rather than piling on more spending to subsidize college cost for the upper-middle-class.
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