Young Hoosiers should know that a college education will likely improve the life ahead of them. Indiana’s leaders need to make sure that message is reaching teenagers.
Yes, the attainment of a college degree comes with difficulties. Those years involve a loss of short-term income, compared to those who enter the workforce straight out of high school. A degree also means incurring significant debt for many students. Hoosier college graduates carry an average of $30,000 in debt.
Still, the potential to offset such debt and deferred income is strong for those who earn associate, bachelor, master and doctoral degrees. One-year skilled-trade training certificates also pay off in the long run. Plus, need-based financial aid is available to make a post-high school education more accessible.
The benefits of a college degree have been revealed through the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2021, one year into the crisis, nearly four million American workers without college degrees had not found work again after losing their jobs in the pandemic, according to U.S. Department of Labor figures cited by the Washington Post. Just 199,000 adult workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher were in the same predicament.
By January of 2022, labor force participation during the pandemic for Americans with a high school diploma or less had fallen 4.3%, the most of any demographic group, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The importance of communicating that message to kids in Indiana’s K-through-12 schools was one of several recommendations approved Thursday by the Indiana Commission for Higher Education. The commission will forward those recommendations to the State Budget Committee of the Indiana General Assembly for its approval later this month.
That legislative body should approve them all.
The recommendations were part of the commission’s 2022 College Readiness Report. That document describes a disturbing trend showing a 12-percentage-point drop in Indiana’s college-going rate since 2015. That decline intensified during the pandemic, but predates COVID. The decline is even steeper for Indiana’s Black, Latino and low-income students. College attendance has declined nationally, too, but Indiana’s decline is steeper. The U.S. college-going rate is down 6 percentage points since 2015. The situation requires an “all hands” on deck response, new Higher Ed Commissioner Chris Lowery said at the commission’s meeting Thursday in Terre Haute. It must involve schools, government, employers, nonprofits, faith groups and others. Most important, though, are concrete actions.
Those steps should include restoring funding for the Frank O'Bannon Grant Program to pre-Great Recession levels. Such a boost would amount to a 35% increase in the need-based grant amounts to a maximum of $12,400 for private institutions and $6,200 for public institutions.
Other recommendations include automatically enrolling all eligible students in Indiana’s 21st Century Scholars program; sharply increasing the number of high school students earning a 30-hour block of college credit through the Indiana College Core; requiring all high school seniors to file federal college financial-aid forms; and revising the state’s outcome-based funding formula to build on recent successes.
An emphasis on the value of college must be a priority. College is not for everyone, and many people thrive and prosper without ever setting foot on a campus, but that possibility has received exaggerated promotion throughout this century.
Ball State University economist Michael Hicks also pointed out that per-student state spending on higher education and K-12 is “far lower” than a decade ago. “Until the state takes seriously the rapid and recent declines in college attendance, we will continue to see our economy slip farther away from the national average,” Hicks said Friday via Twitter.
Indiana has the means to remedy the situation. The commission has provided a roadmap. It is time for the state to affirm its faith in the education offered at the colleges and universities that attract students from other states and around the world.
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