Monday, March 15, 1982
Daily Nebraskan
page 5
Students learn economic realities from new cuts
The picture In the Sunday paper was a
perfect yearbook photo for the class of
'82. Caption it: The class of economic
anxiety.
There they were. Hundreds of students
standing together in front of a wide-angle
lens on the steps of the Capitol, all posing
in a demonstration against cuts in higher
education and student loans.
In the front rows, about three dozen of
them were holding posterboard letters
across an uneven line. Like a card section
at halftime, they spelled out: Call or Write
Contress. Support Higher Education.
Together they were the very portrait of
the year that higher education went the
way of the auto industry. The year when
nn Ellen
Kf Goodman
students on every campus wondered from
day to day if they'd get the pink slip from
the government. The year when more and
more undergraduates began majoring in
Economic Realities.
The proposed new slashes in student
loans are yet another powerful shot of un
certainly, yet another fix for the anxiety
that now courses regularly through the
veins of the college community.
Those of us who have been on campuses
frequently in the past half-dozen years
have watched the stress level go up and up.
To this day, I carry snapshots in my mind
of dozens of students all shaken with un
certainties about the things they once
assumed: an education, a job, a future.
The pressures seem enormous. The bulk
of them face the inexorable problem,
semester by semester, of raising funds for a
rising tuition. Let Treasury Secretary
Donald Regan share his memories of stu
dent life like in 1940: . . There is such a
think called working your way through
college. I did it." In 1982, it is virtually
impossible to work through college as a
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full-time student. College tuition is too
high and jobs are too scarce.
In a host of ways, the anxieties of this
economy have trickled down to the class
room and the dorm.
The students in need of loans wait, like
farmers or small business owners, for the
news to delivery their future plans. They
fear that without loans there will be no
college. Hut they also fear that the debt
that comes more and more often with the
degree. At the same time, students who
contemplate dropping out know they'll
enter an unwelcoming job market, and
know that even graduation offers no
guarantees.
It isn't just the cost of higher education
that makes this an anxious time. It is also
wondering about the value of it.
Today there are 1 2 million students in
colleges and universities, twice the number
enrolled just 20 years ago. When half the
high school graduates go on for another
degree, that piece of paper can no longer
offer a head start in the marketplace. The
income "bonus" for a college graduate in
the work world is shrinking, as the price
tag is growing.
In the album of uncertainities, the stu
dents I have met ponder all of these un
knowns and long for some security. In
evitably the class of anxiety talks more
about "marketable skills" than about liter
ature, worries more about access to the job
market in their future than access to their
culture in the past. It comes with the
times.
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nofflsfti aS)E mis?
Those lucky enough to have parents
who can pay for school still fit in this mass
portrait. Highly conscious of the sacrifice
of their families, they feel particularly
caught between the parents who want
them to pursue a skill and the teachers who
want them to pursue an idea.
It is rare now to find a college professor
without the same sympathetic lament.
They describe students who are fearful, in
search of answers instead of arguments,
credentials instead of quests. At best, these
young people regard college as a tricky
tunnel to negotiate on their way to life.
Inside the Capitol where the photo was
takcn,4here was a great deal of talk about
education and the economy. interest rates,
inflation, unemployment, government
support, student loans. There was palpable
fear on the part of the college administrat
ors that wc would have a two-track, or
three-track, education: private schools for
the rich, public schools for the middle
class, none for the rest.
But there's already a two-track educat
ion world. Today only the most privileged
can afford what we blushingly call the love
of learning. This is the real casualty of the
times. For the class of '82, the class of
anxiety, the pursuit of knowledge has be
come a luxury.
(c) 1982, The Washington Post Company
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