“The economy blows.”
That’s Ariel Stitt’s take. She lays her textbook flat on a table in the crowded student center at Georgia Perimeter College’s campus here and then continues: “The HOPE Scholarship got cut, so a lot of students got their HOPE taken away, or got a traumatic cut. One of my best friends’ parents’ house was foreclosed, so they moved back to New York. And gas prices—OMG! I used to have an SUV, and I could spend $240 to $260 a month on gas.”
“Now I have to take Marta"—that’s the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority—"to get to school. I walk to the bus, take that to a train, take that train to another train, then another bus, then I walk here.”
Ms. Stitt lives with her family and works part time as a server at a Mellow Mushroom pizza restaurant. She’s an international-business major at Georgia Perimeter, a two-year college with four campuses on Atlanta’s outskirts (the “Perimeter” of the name is Interstate 285, which encircles the city). But her catalog of recession-related woes would sound familiar to almost any college student in the region: Unemployment here hovers around 11 percent, about two points higher than the national average, and foreclosure signs dot suburban streets and cul-de-sacs.
Visits to three local institutions—Agnes Scott College, Georgia State University, and Perimeter—turn up students who say they’re spending more hours at part-time jobs and less money on themselves. Faculty members say they haven’t gotten raises but are glad they still have jobs. Administrators say they’ve had to resort to furloughs or even layoffs to keep budgets balanced. And everyone is worried that the recession won’t end anytime soon.
A few tables away from Ms. Stitt sits Asmir Vehabovic, who says he’d be at Georgia Tech studying computer science if the economy were better, instead of working full time in customer service for Publix Super Markets and taking classes here. Daniela Duque, who works full time as an emergency medical technician, says she just enrolled this semester as a full-time nursing student—a feat she’s managing by taking classes here as well as at a Georgia Perimeter site in Alpharetta, about 12 miles north of here.
“More students are just exhausted, because they’re working more,” says Ellen Sweatt, an associate professor who has taught accounting for 26 years on this compact campus, where modest buildings cluster around a quadrangle just big enough for a multiethnic touch-football game. “I try to tell them to go straight through the summer,” rather than taking summers off and finding themselves overwhelmed during fall and spring semesters.
The changes in Georgia’s HOPE program cut hundreds of millions of dollars in scholarship payouts. Changes include requiring students to maintain 3.0 grade-point averages in college (there was no such requirement before), chopping 10 percent off the scholarship amounts, and eliminating allowances for fees and books. Generally speaking, the scholarships are available to students at public and private colleges in Georgia who graduated from Georgia high schools with grade-point averages of at least 3.0. But the Georgia Student Finance Commission estimates that the number of students receiving the scholarships will drop by half this year, from 256,502 in 2010-11 to 129,220 this year.
Richard Beaubien, Georgia Perimeter’s director of recruitment and admissions, says the faltering economy has brought “a big increase in the number of applications"—17,500 for all four of the institution’s campuses this fall, out of which 11,100 students were admitted (Georgia Perimeter is the state’s third-largest college, after the University of Georgia and Georgia State). Since the recession began, there’s been a 10-percent increase in applicants submitting SAT scores, which the college does not require. Most likely those students also applied to colleges that do require SAT scores, Mr. Beaubien says, adding that Perimeter costs significantly less than other state institutions or proprietary colleges—$82 per credit for Georgia residents taking courses part time, or $1,235 per semester for residents enrolled full time.
As more traditional-age college students have turned to Perimeter, the average age of applicants has dropped, from 26 to 22. The college is also attracting more students who take only a few courses and then transfer the credits elsewhere—to Georgia Tech or even the University of California at Los Angeles. “We’re a lot cheaper,” Mr. Beaubien says, but the credits count the same. Georgia Perimeter could enroll many more students if it had more classroom buildings, he adds. But with state budgets tight, there are strict limits on construction for any institution in the University System of Georgia, of which Georgia Perimeter is a unit. “Space is a huge issue.”
Meanwhile, Georgia Perimeter has added personal counselors on each of its campuses, in part to help students cope with fallout from the recession. The counselors help students manage money, stress, and anxiety, among other challenges, says Vincent June, vice president for student affairs and enrollment, and they also help faculty members recognize students with mental-health problems. “People are losing their homes, their jobs, their cars—they don’t know which way to turn,” Mr. June says. “We’ve had to do referrals to shelters.” The college has also seen demand rise “quite a bit” for appointments at the clinic it operates as part of its dental-hygiene program. Students in the program will clean a patient’s teeth for about $30—a bargain rate—and the 240 appointments available every month fill up fast.
The Atlanta region remains “a wasteland of unemployment—it’s pretty grim still,” says Robert King, an associate professor of political science on Perimeter’s original campus, in Clarkston. Faculty members—the college has about 550 who teach full time—are glad to have jobs in such a terrible economy, he says, even though they have not had raises in the past four years and, like everyone in the university system, had to take six furlough days last year. The number of courses faculty members teach has stayed the same—five in one semester, four the next—but some class sizes are increasing. Social-science courses have the largest sections, with about 35 students each, Mr. King says, and instructors in writing-oriented courses “are maxed out—they’re grading, grading, grading all the time.”
But the good news, at least for Georgia Perimeter, is that it’s attracting so many students. “Some people here see the enrollment increases as a negative because they mean more work,” Mr. June says. “But they also generate more revenue, so we haven’t had to lay people off.” Indeed, the college has hired 30 tenure-track faculty members this year in an effort to keep up with enrollment growth.
Still, faculty members can’t help but see the pain in their neighborhoods, even their families. “As an economist, I’m more discouraged about our economy than I ever have been,” says Janet Orr, an instructor in the economics department. A lot of people are upside-down on their mortgages, she notes, and her daughter, who just graduated from the University of Georgia with degrees in statistics and anthropology, couldn’t find the museum job she was hoping to land. Instead, she’s going to work as a textbook-sales representative.
Food Stamps and Credit Cards
Some 17 miles to the south, in downtown Atlanta, Georgia State is attracting more students, too. “We’re at 32,006 as of this morning,” Timothy M. Renick, provost and vice president for academic affairs, says in his office in a former bank building one late-September day. The university prides itself on enrolling—and graduating—a wide range of minority students. “Almost all of those underrepresented populations are growing,” Mr. Renick says, but that also means the university is enrolling more and more needy students. In this year’s freshman class of 2,700, 53 percent receive Pell Grants and 30 percent come from households bringing in $30,000 a year or less.
He can see the effects of the limping economy in all kinds of statistics. For instance, a larger number of students than ever registered for classes but failed to pay their tuition bills by the time the first deadline arrived—"double the number we saw last fall,” he says. “We’re not sitting back like we usually would. We’re contacting students one by one. We’re calling literally hundreds of students and asking them what their needs are.” The university doesn’t have deep-enough pockets to help more than a few students with additional aid, he says, but it can help them take advantage of options they may not know about or understand.
Last year’s freshman class offered another example. The class was “the best ever academically,” Mr. Renick says, but even so, 130 students didn’t come back for the second semester, compared with just 23 the year before. When university officials did some research, they found that many of those who failed to return had paid their fall tuition with Visa or Mastercard.
“A lot of my friends have one, two, three jobs,” says Michael O. Oloyede, a sophomore marketing major who is working 20 hours a week this year. Last year he worked only 10 hours a week because he had a Pell Grant, but this year he’s ineligible because his father is making more money. Even though he had to drop a class to balance studying with work, he considers himself fortunate: “A lot of my friends have food stamps,” he says over Chick-fil-A sandwiches and waffle fries—Southern fast-food favorites that happen to be fairly inexpensive—in the University Center.
At Georgia State, whose buildings crowd several blocks downtown, tuition, room, and board cost about $20,000 a year for Georgia residents. This year’s cuts mean that students on HOPE scholarships—nearly three-quarters of the university’s enrollment, including Mr. Oloyede—must come up with an extra $2,000 or so. Meanwhile, three federal student-aid programs that were discontinued this year had funneled about $9-million a year to Georgia State students.
“Some of my friends are taking out extra loans, or picking up extra hours,” says Courtney L. McDonald, a junior journalism major. She notes that the university was founded in 1913 as Georgia Tech’s Evening School of Commerce, and that “this has always been a school where people come who need to work.” Mr. Renick says that 85 percent of students have jobs of some sort, and that students are increasingly independent of their parents.
The university is trying to keep students’ costs low, Mr. Renick adds. “When we built Freshman Hall two years ago, it was designed to allow students to live on campus who don’t have a lot of resources.” So the $15.7-million building houses freshmen in 325 compact rooms and without the superabundance of amenities now common on other campuses. Some other students live in two former hotels that the university was able to buy cheaply because Atlanta’s commercial real-estate market is so depressed.
‘We’re All Broke’
A few miles away, on Agnes Scott College’s tree-shaded, 100-acre campus, the list price for tuition, room, and board this year is about $42,000, more than twice what Georgia State students pay. Thanks to Agnes Scott’s 61-percent tuition-discount rate, many of the 950 students at the all-female liberal-arts college actually pay far less, but a number are struggling nonetheless, says Patrick Bonones, director of financial aid. “Average family income has decreased in the past few years,” he says. The college has kept tuition increases to 3 percent a year, but families’ needs have risen too, not least because of this year’s HOPE cuts.
Alexa Gaeta, a 1998 graduate of the college who is director of admission, sees a strong commitment to Agnes Scott among many applicant families. “Conversations with parents are, ‘How are we going to swing this?’” she says. “People are working really hard to make it work.”
She has a lot of sympathy for families’ struggles, too: Her husband was unemployed for a year after being laid off by the Internet provider Earthlink (he has since been hired by IBM). And their suburban neighborhood has so many foreclosures, she says, that while they’d like to move closer to both their jobs, they doubt they could sell their house.
Kendall Prevatt, one of the freshmen Ms. Gaeta admitted this year, says she’s paying for her Agnes Scott education herself, because her parents “aren’t doing as well as they used to.” It’s a struggle attending a college like Agnes Scott if your family’s not well off, says Ms. Prevatt, who is from Buena Vista, Ga., where her mother runs an embroidery shop. In addition to putting the money she was given for graduating from high school toward college expenses, she says, she has already taken out $7,000 in loans.
Not everyone makes similar choices, though, she says. “Some of my friends—some of the top people in my high school who got accepted amazing places—chose local universities to get HOPE and live at home.”
The sour economy isn’t just affecting individuals, either. It caught up with the college’s budget earlier this year in a big way: In a bid to cut costs, Agnes Scott offered early-retirement packages to a number of faculty and staff members—24 people accepted—and then laid off 16 more people, including an alumna who answered phones and greeted visitors in the admissions office, Ms. Gaeta says.
Elizabeth Kiss, the college’s president, says the retirements and layoffs were partly the result of a strategic-planning process that began in early 2008, before the stock market imploded. The planning process led the trustees to conclude that Agnes Scott needed to rely less on its endowment, which provides about 40 percent of its operating revenue. “We needed to realign revenues and expenditures,” says Ms. Kiss (her last name is pronounced like “quiche”).
“When the recession hit, we focused on tightening our belts,” she says. “But in summer 2010, we realized we were not going to be able to outrun the recession.” The endowment had lost 20 percent of its value, and it was clear that the 12-quarter rolling balance on which the endowment draw is based wouldn’t stabilize for several years. When it does stabilize, the president says, the college will be able to draw about $3-million less a year than it had previously, so $3-million became the target for the budget cut. “Layoffs are hard in a very small community,” Ms. Kiss says. The college now has 81 full-time faculty members, and the student-faculty ratio has edged up from 9:1 to 10:1.
By 2020, the college hopes to reduce its discount rate to 58 percent and increase its enrollment to 1,100—in part by looking to markets outside of Georgia—to get income and spending in sync. It’s also in the silent phase of a capital campaign—though that, too, is being affected by the economy, the president says. “Some people are saying, ‘You can count on me, but come back in two years.’” And some things are outside of the institution’s control, she knows. With more and more students getting Pell Grants, the new round of budget talks in Washington is “frightening,” she says.
Agnes Scott’s students appear to feel the same way. Shenaika Davis, a senior majoring in English and creative writing, says some friends who have already graduated from college “are being chased by Sallie Mae” because they owe money on their student loans. “Everybody’s in the same boat,” Ms. Davis says. “It used to be not really spoken of. Now it’s like, ‘I don’t have enough money.’ We’re all broke.”
