If Rick Santorum or Mitt Romney become President, there would not be much hope for mobility in the middle class. Santorum disregards colleges as “indoctrination mills,” suggesting that college is not the key to success that the Obama administration considers it to be. Romney encouraged one student to find a low budget college, “And don’t expect government to forgive the debt you take on.”
This is very hard to hear from one candidate who has a Master’s degree and a J.D. and another candidate who attended an Ivy League school without the burden of student loans. There’s a hard subtext that says, “I’ve got mine, but you can’t assume you’ll get yours.” Or, as Paul Krugman concluded in his commentary on the two Republican candidates, “they believe that what you don’t know can’t hurt them” (New York Times, March 9).
The half-truths involved in these campaigns for the Republican nomination obscure the brutal message of stunted class mobility from decreased access to higher education. It is true that a university education is not the solution to an inadequate high school education. Many students will climax their education in high school, if they have the staying power and the family income to sustain them. High school graduation should prepare them for something, not merely college.
And it’s true that there are excellent moderate-priced universities for students to choose, although with persistent declines in state funding, “the tuition at public four-year colleges has risen 70% over the past decade,” according to Krugman. Graduates of such public institutions may not move directly into a six-figure income like Governor Romney, and many of them will have paid for their entire education with student loans that Romney will not forgive.
Even with such considerations, a college education remains the surest path to mobility within the middle and lower middle classes. Census data show that a college education will likely double the earned income compared to what a high school graduate will earn (2006). The funds that allow so many college undergraduates to continue their education come from Pell Grants and other forms of federal student aid. It is not the philanthropic funding from the private sector that keeps students from dropping out of college, it is the aid that pays their tuition while they work half-time or even full-time to pay their room and board.
How much of this do the sons of privilege understand? How concerned are they for the first-generation college students whose every semester is a pitched battle between earning and learning? How much do they care for the students who study their way out of poverty?
Perhaps this campaign does amount to class warfare, but the battle is not over who gets taxed. The battle front is the opportunity to learn and the possibility of social and economic advancement. If they don’t understand the plight of students on the margins of higher education, then the Republican candidates are sadly misinformed. If they do understand the full implications of their policies toward higher education, then they are engaging in class warfare by despising or denying these opportunities.