The sticker price of a college degree in America has never been higher, and tuition won’t be getting cheaper any time soon. These costs have been ballooning upward for decades, well above the rate of inflation. Many high school graduates face a decision — accumulating thousands of dollars of debt alongside their college degree or braving a brutal job market without one. The latter, however, isn’t an easy option. Of adults aged 25-32 with only high school diplomas, over one in five live below the poverty line, according to a February Pew poll. For those who choose to pursue a college degree, some find that taking out loans is still not enough. Miriam Weeks, a Duke University rising sophomore, discusses her turn to pornography to pay for her college tuition in a recent Time article: “Faced with either a degree from a less prestigious school or decades of crushing debt, a few hours of work on a porn set revealed itself to be the best way to avoid getting screwed.”
Weeks’s decision to make adult films may seem like an unusual — if not unimaginable — solution to students at Dartmouth. After all, the financial aid office trumpets its commitment to meeting “100 percent of demonstrated financial need for all four years.” Therefore, it would seem that by matriculating at an elite and tremendously wealthy Ivy League college, Dartmouth students have managed to escape the crushing debt acquired by so many students across the country.
The U.S. Department of Education’s data on student debt, however, paints a very different picture. Forty-six percent of Dartmouth students graduate with student loan debt, while the figure is only 39 percent at Duke University, where Weeks is a student. More interesting is the average debt accrued by students who take out these loans. On average, Dartmouth students who take out loans accumulate an eye-popping $17,825. Compared to its Ivy League peers, Dartmouth lags behind: at Yale University and Harvard University, students on average graduate with around $12,000 of debt; at Princeton University, graduating students owe a paltry $5,096. Despite having one of the highest endowment-per-student ratios in the world, Dartmouth still manages to send off a sizeable piece of its graduates each year with more debt than a family of two at the poverty line makes in a year.
Many would argue that, regardless of its price, a Dartmouth education remains a worthy investment. Seventeen-thousand dollars in debt appears a small price to pay when stacked against the millions of dollars one can reap on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley after graduation, but what about the students whose dreams may not be so lucrative? With the prospect of a competitive job market, some students feel pressured to forgo their aspirations altogether in pursuit of careers that are more financially secure. Dartmouth should empower students to pursue their passions without hesitation; when the College fails to use its enormous financial resources to reduce student debt, it forces some students to temper their dreams. English majors may feel pressure to switch to computer science, math majors may end up as quants on Wall Street and physics majors could choose to simulate stock prices instead of solar plasma. One wonders if as many of these career decisions would be made in the absence of financial strain.
In only a few months, the College has received several large donations: $100 million in April, $10 million more later in the month, and another $10 million this summer. According to College President Phil Hanlon, the money from these contributions will focus on increasing the academic excellence of Dartmouth. These gifts will create three new professorships for faculty who use computational science, support Hanlon’s new cluster initiative and expand and renovate the Hood Museum of Art, respectively. While the College receives such generous donations, the ability to afford a Dartmouth education is still an issue for many students. Money is flowing into the College at a dizzying rate, making the so-called Dartmouth experience literally more valuable than ever. The only thing being forgotten in this lavish scheme is the students who have to pay for it.
The column has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction appended (7/11/14):
A $10 million April gift established professorships in the field of computational science, not computer science. The column has been corrected.
