How to Talk About Higher Ed Around the Thanksgiving Table: a Brief Guide

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If you’re heading home for the holidays, you are likely to face a fair share of questions about life in the ivory tower.

Nonacademic friends and family members may ask you about recent news developments that started on college campuses, such as Trump chalkings, safe spaces, or student debt.

Most of those questions resist simple explanations, but that’s not going to stop Aunt Sue from demanding a quick answer. Here’s a primer on commonly asked questions, some of which may be out of your area of expertise, that you may be asked as you pass the stuffing.

Why does college cost so much?

Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of educational leadership, management, and policy at Seton Hall University, says he has been asked that question plenty of times, and like many answers in academe, it’s complicated.

Still, there are a few key points to remember while reminding people that faculty salaries and administrative bloat aren’t the sole reasons for rising costs. “It’s really a perfect storm of factors affecting higher education,” Mr. Kelchen says.

Some factors include highly skilled labor, pension plans for an aging work force, and more polished, recently renovated buildings for students, he says. Colleges are building top-notch residence halls and doing away with cinderblock dormitories as students demand nicer facilities.

Dorm amenities also aren’t the only factors driving prices up, as colleges are providing students with more mental-health counselors, career advisers, and other supplemental services to improve campus life.

“The student experience has changed from a few decades ago,” Mr. Kelchen says. “Part of it is, students want nicer things. And students both want and need some additional services.”

While friends and family members may know about reduced state funding for higher education across the country, it’s important to note that, for the most part, state funding is keeping up with inflation but not the rate of enrollment, Mr. Kelchen says. If state funding were the main source of funding, he says, tuition would rise at public colleges and universities much more quickly.

What does the student-debt crisis mean? How much debt are students really in?

The average college graduate who borrowed to pay tuition and other higher-ed costs has student-loan debt of $30,000 to $35,000, Mr. Kelchen says. The stories about graduates who face $100,000 in debt often involve outliers — people who attended an expensive college or who went on to attend a graduate or professional school. Those graduates, he says, are most likely to take jobs that pay enough to manage their debt.

The real concern should be for students who drop out of college with debt because people lacking any academic credential may be unable to get a job that will help them pay off their loans. “Student debt is not a big deal if you graduate, but it’s a really big deal if you don’t,” Mr. Kelchen says.

There was speculation that President-elect Donald J. Trump wouldn’t win white voters with college degrees, but he did. Why did that shift happen?

While Mr. Trump seemed to be carrying white voters with lower education levels during the campaign, he also won white college-educated voters. Mr. Trump won 49 percent of white voters with college credentials, and Hillary Clinton won 45 percent. Mrs. Clinton won nonwhite college graduates, taking 71 percent of those voters to Mr. Trump’s 23 percent.

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Plenty of white voters have college degrees, but having a college degree is not the same as having absorbed the culture of an elite campus, says Peter Lawler, a professor of government at Berry College.

People voted based on their personal interests, Mr. Lawler says, not on their college degrees. And with more people feeling as if they lacked the economic resources to live the lives they wanted, voters picked a candidate who spoke to that frustration, he says.

Still, the debate continues over why white voters with college degrees voted for Mr. Trump. One popular theory is that Mr. Trump’s narrative — that jobs migrating overseas left voters wanting change — resonated powerfully for voters both with and without college degrees. Voter identity may also have explained Mr. Trump’s win. People who make more than $100,000 annually may still see themselves as having working-class roots and may have voted for Mr. Trump.

What’s all this I’m hearing about trigger warnings and safe spaces?

In many cases trigger warnings are a simple alert about material to be covered in class, and many professors say such warnings have been a classroom practice for decades. Critics, however, say trigger warnings are another way for students to get out of doing assignments by saying the material makes them feel uncomfortable.

It’s important to remember that when professors want to minimize discrimination, there is usually a broader context of how students feel discriminated against, says Rebecca Plante, an associate professor of sociology at Ithaca College. There’s no one way a student may feel hurt or discriminated against, and sometimes a student’s reaction is emotional, not logical.

For example, Ms. Plante says, about a week before teaching a lesson on sexual violence in a course about sexuality, she tells students about the coming topic. She also says that the lesson is placed at a specific point in the semester because by then students have learned analytical reasoning to best evaluate the lesson, and anyone who needs to make alternative arrangements is free to talk to her.

Safe spaces are also nothing new in campus practice. Scholars began using the term in the 1960s and 1970s, when lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students sought safe spaces as physical locations where people would not be discriminated against or prosecuted. Today safe spaces on campuses can be multicultural centers or a classroom where minority students feel comfortable sharing their opinions.

Why is there so much attention on campuses to sexual assault?

Sexual assault has been an issue for decades, but heightened public attention followed more-aggressive enforcement of Title IX, a key federal gender-equity law, by the Obama administration.

“More often it seems like this is coming out of nowhere, but this has been an ongoing issue for years, and we’re just making sure that colleges and universities have the tools to help these students who find themselves in these situations,” says Amy Beyer, an academic adviser at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln who wrote her master’s thesis on how college comply with Title IX in their sexual-assault policies.

Title IX doesn’t just mean equal access to sports programs on campuses for men and women, as many people think. The Obama administration has aggressively interpreted the law to include an institution’s responsibility to protect women from an environment of sexual violence and harassment.

Ms. Plante says it’s easy to infer that, before such aggressive enforcement, sexual assault was still occurring, but students were simply not reporting it. Now another challenge isn’t just getting students to report sexual assaults, but helping all parties on a campus figure out how to standardize what sexual assault means.

Why aren’t college athletes paid?

Christian Spears, deputy athletics director at Eastern Michigan University, says he is asked that question all the time, not just around the holidays. Usually he begins his answer by explaining the resources that colleges already provide to athletes: nutritionists, counselors, tutors, top-notch athletics facilities, trainers, and equipment managers. Athletes also receive other forms of aid, in scholarships, Pell Grants, and financial aid to help them attend the institution, he says.

“That opportunity to utilize those individuals for their success is where the payment comes in,” Mr. Spears says. “And that’s why they don’t receive a salary — because they receive quality instruction, immense support to enhance their student-athlete experience on the campus.”

That argument is largely echoed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, but it has an army of critics, who say the NCAA’s upholding of “amateurism” is misleading and disingenuous. The biggest programs rake in millions of dollars every year, and coaches are some of the highest paid employees on campuses. While coaches’ compensation is quickly rising, athletes are limited to their scholarships and the perks their university’s athletics program provides.

Those limits have spurred Jeffrey Kessler, a lawyer who helped bring free agency to the NFL and the NBA, to challenge the NCAA’s amateurism rules. Mr. Kessler is representing a former Clemson University football player in a lawsuit that seeks to create a market for college athletes. And the debate won’t be solved anytime soon. This year the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case about athletes’ compensation, leaving the stage set for future battles.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz is a web writer. Follow her on Twitter @FernandaZamudio, or email her at fzamudiosuarez@chronicle.com.