Just inside one of the main gates of the Iowa State Fair, before the stands that sell some 70 treats, including corn dogs, deep-fried candy bars, and pork chops on a stick; before the Midway, where the Scorpion and the Sky Wheel pirouette overhead; before the pens of baby calves and sheep, days old and teetering on wobbly legs; before the Butter Cow, the carved-butter sculpture that, aside from glad-handing politicians, has become the fair’s most-enduring symbol — before all of that is a kitted-out RV that is home to the University of Iowa’s Mobile Museum.
On Saturday morning, families clambered up the trailer’s narrow steps to gaze at interactive displays on Iowa’s aquifers and the university’s role in space exploration. J.C. Gillett, who graduated a year ago with degrees in history and museum studies, runs the roving museum. “It’s really a museum about the state, for the state,” he says of the exhibit, which takes to the road four or five days a week from April to October. “The people of Iowa deserve to see what’s going on at the University of Iowa.”
If the museum’s goal is to make Iowa’s research more accessible to the public — by 11:30 Saturday, there were more than 700 visitors — the university itself, and higher education in general, is at risk of becoming less accessible. Nationwide, tuition has been on a decades-long climb, while students and their families are being asked to shoulder an ever-growing share of the expense.
Here in Iowa, it’s no different. In the past five years, state spending on Iowa’s three public universities has fallen more than 20 percent. Tuition has made up the shortfall.
I came to Des Moines, to the State Fair, to talk to voters about college affordability. Politicians have begun sounding the alarm about the cost of college; Hillary Clinton was in Iowa at the same time I was, talking up her plan to rein in student debt. These ideas reverberate in Washington’s echo chamber, but I wanted to know if they resonate with average citizens.
Do they think college is too expensive, I wondered, and if so, whom do they hold responsible? How would they fix it? What do they want for their children, for their grandchildren?
In talking with dozens of voters over two days, I sensed both frustration and resignation. Rising tuition bills are pretty much an inevitability, I was told time and again, and I encountered deep skepticism that colleges and public officials could, or would, do much to curb costs.
Instead, I heard from parents working extra jobs to pay tuition bills and from grandparents skimming from their retirement savings to seed college accounts. Earning a degree is critical in today’s economy, almost everyone agreed. Left unsaid is whether, for future generations, it will be possible.
Wrestling With Trade-Offs
I met Raelynn Schroeder and her daughter Macy, 9, and son Carter, 5, in the far corner of the cattle barn, where they were giving Belle, a prize heifer who belongs to Ms. Schroeder’s older son, Logan, a bath. A mist rose off their hose and beads of water appeared to hang in the humid air.
Ms. Schroeder and her husband attended Central College, a private liberal-arts college in Pella, where they live. They only recently finished paying off their student loans, 15 years after graduation. So it seems almost inconceivable, Ms. Schroeder says, that in a few short years it will be time for Logan, who is 11, to go to college. “It’ll be here before we know it,” she says with a small sigh as Macy tugs on the lead to guide Belle back to her stall.
Each of the children have college savings accounts, set up for them by her husband’s parents. But Ms. Schroeder can do the math, and she knows it will not be enough, not nearly. Still, the family can’t afford to set aside much more — while her husband has a good job in IT, Ms. Schroeder gave up her work as an interior decorator two years ago to stay home with the kids.
Though she has a bachelor’s degree, Ms. Schroeder says she would consider sending her children to community college, if only to save money for a couple of years before they transfer to a four-year institution. Such a path could be made even more affordable if a proposal by President Obama to make community college free is enacted. Ms. Clinton has borrowed a page from her former boss and has also included free community college in her $350-million higher-education plan. (The idea, it should be noted, has not exactly been universally embraced.)
Starting at a community college would mean missing out on some parts of the four-year college experience she herself treasured, Ms. Schroeder concedes, but if her children wanted to go there, “I wouldn’t shy away.”
Other parents are also wrestling with difficult trade-offs.
It was the end of a long day at the fair, and as Steve Chapman and I spoke, his 3-year-old son, Noah, who was riding on his shoulders, grew drowsy. The little boy rested his head on his father’s, using his dad’s close-cropped skull as a pillow.
Noah has three older siblings, ages 6, 8, and 10, and all have college accounts, started at birth. Mr. Chapman and his wife deposited an initial $5,000 in each account and continue to set aside $1,000 per year per child. When the children reach high school, however, the Chapmans will stop making contributions. The children attend private Catholic school, and Mr. Chapman says the family can’t afford both tuition and paying into college savings. Instead, he expects them to hold down part-time jobs to pay for college.
Mr. Chapman attended Iowa on a scholarship, and he wishes his kids, too, could be free to just focus on schoolwork, without juggling a job. But tuition has gone up, far faster than any cost-of-living raise he’s earned, and their savings, he fears, won’t go as far as they once did. “I just wish they’d hold steady,” Mr. Chapman says of tuition rates, “then maybe we could kind of catch up.”
Mr. Chapman would like the state to do more to support public colleges, but he doesn’t seem to expect it. When revenues are tight, after all, legislatures frequently cut higher education, one of few big pots of discretionary spending, to balance their budgets. It pains him to think that his children could face a tougher time than he did. That’s not how the American dream is supposed to work, after all.
“I’ve come to terms with the costs” of college, he says, patting his sleeping son’s leg, “but I worry they will have to suffer.”
Personal vs. Public Good
Bob Miller understands a little something about sacrifice. He served in Vietnam. When he came back to the States, the military paid for his engineering degree.
White-haired with a well-trimmed beard, he’s now retired, which gave him time to take his 14-year-old granddaughter Lily, visiting from Michigan, to the State Fair. “I’m certainly concerned about the expense,” Mr. Miller says of sending Lily, who is interested in astronomy and psychology, to college. “But I’m also certain that she’ll go.”
Higher education is too important to be optional, he says. He knows the difference it made in his own life, how much more financial security he had than childhood friends without a degree. Figuring out how to curtail the cost of college, though, is less clear to Mr. Miller. While colleges could hold the line on tuition, he suggests, employers might also help out by defraying some educational expenses for their workers. The federal government could offer students interest-free loans. “There’s no single solution,” he says.
If folks like Mr. Miller see an expanded role for government in ensuring college access and affordability, others think public officials should stay out of the way.
Bob Haug is one of them. I ran into him as he watched his daughter JoAnna, who goes by J.J., groom her horse, Babe, in preparation for the evening’s rodeo competition. Babe’s coat shone, a glossy black. Though the competition was still hours off, J.J., who is 12 and rides events called barrels and poles, had her hair in curlers, afraid to take them out lest her waves wilt in the humidity. “If she could be on a horse all day, she would,” Mr. Haug says of his daughter, who wants to be a veterinarian.
Mr. Haug, who lives in Corydon, a small town near the Missouri border, didn’t go to college. He joined Federal Express after high school and worked his way up into a management position, a dozen years of working nights. He finally saved up enough to buy his grandfather’s pest-control business. Now he is able travel with J.J. to rodeos. The family planned to spend the entire day at the State Fair, then get up before dawn for yet another competition.
When Mr. Haug spoke, he echoed an argument I’ve heard many times over the years — that a college education is largely a personal, not a public, good. Its prime beneficiary is the individual graduate, and therefore the student, and her family, should pay. “I don’t know how the government getting involved,” Mr. Haug says, “is going to help things.”
College is expensive, Mr. Haug says, but if J.J. wants to go — and he’ll encourage her to — they’ll find the money. Maybe if she keeps at it, J.J. could get rodeo scholarships — earn them, he emphasizes, through hours of practice and hard work.
“I’ve never been one to have my hand out,” he says, “and I don’t want my kids to, either.”
Skeptical of Political Promises
Joanna Debont put her hand out. Well, her arm to be exact, for a temporary tattoo of Drake University’s mascot, Spike the Bulldog.
It’s a State Fair tradition for colleges and businesses to give out free temporary tattoos. Children compete to see how many they can collect, accumulating sleevefuls of ink that would look at home in many a restaurant kitchen.
Ms. Debont admitted she was a little old for a State Fair tat, but she was making an exception for Drake, the Des Moines college where her 17-year-old daughter Kaleigh begins classes at the end of the month. “Our resident overachiever,” she calls Kaleigh who finished high school in three years and graduated near the top of her class.
The private college has a hefty price tag, $33,550 a year for tuition alone, but Kaleigh loved its academics and its strong music program. Drake has awarded Kaleigh $17,000 in scholarships, and she will save money by living at home. Still, Ms. Debont and her husband, Kim, worry about the financial burden. They have taken out loans; Mr. Debont, who is 60, will put off retirement for a few more years.
When the Debonts went to college the costs were manageable, loans quickly paid off. By contrast, they worry that debt could hamstring Kaleigh, tether her to a paycheck rather than allow her to follow her dreams.
Of the many people I met in Iowa, the Debonts were the only ones to offer firm opinions about presidential aspirants’ college-affordability plans. Even though Hillary Clinton has been grabbing headlines with her higher-ed proposals, holding a Friday town hall meeting on student debt in Dubuque, I was repeatedly told, there are simply too many candidates in the race to pay attention to specific policy ideas. “They’re all just promises. It’s all just politics,” one young mother said, her comments punctuated by the rotors of Donald Trump’s helicopter scything overhead.
Joanna Debont, who calls herself a liberal, says she likes Ms. Clinton’s ideas but is backing Sen. Bernard Sanders, the Vermont independent who has advocated making public four-year college free for all students. And she singled out for special criticism Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, who recently signed a budget cutting state higher-ed spending by $250 million over two years. “I think he would eliminate all education spending if he could,” she says.
If the Debonts are unusual in their engagement in politics and policy, when talking about the cost of college they sound in most other ways like their fellow Iowans, anxious, apprehensive, a little bewildered. “It’s hard for me to fathom that kind of debt,” Kim Debont says of the $40,000 to $50,000 his daughter is likely to owe. “How did costs balloon so fast? How did it get so out-of-hand?”
Karin Fischer writes about international education, colleges and the economy, and other issues. She’s on Twitter @karinfischer, and her email address is karin.fischer@chronicle.com.
