Unruh event focuses on tuition hikes

The Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics hosted its first “Students Talk Back: A Weekly Politics and Public Policy Forum” discussion of the semester Wednesday in partnership with the USC College Democrats, USC College Republicans and the Daily Trojan. This week’s topic was “Making College Affordable,” a bipartisan discussion on how to pay for college.

The talk was moderated by Dan Schnur, director of the Unruh Institute, and Yasmeen Serhan,  managing editor of the Daily Trojan.

The panel included Larry Gordon, education writer at the Los Angeles Times; Sarah Dhanaphatana, secretary of the College Republicans and deputy features editor; and Audrey Dow, vice president of external affairs for the Campaign for College Opportunity.

The discussion began by noting the $2,000 increase in USC tuition this year and how tuition hikes affected not just USC students, but all students throughout the state. Dhanaphatana attributed these increases in tuition to institutional spending, asserting that the greater spending there is on things such as new facilities and administrators, the greater the need for an increase in tuition costs.

According to Dow, whose work focuses on improving access to higher education, California needs to do more to meet the increasing demand for an educated work force. Dow said that because of the changing economy, more workers will be required in the next five years and that, by 2020, 60 percent of those workers will be required to have a post-secondary education.

“In California, we’re 1 million baccalaureate degrees short of what our economy needs to sustain itself,” Dow said. “We are not producing the number of graduates that we need to sustain the quality of life that you and I enjoy.”

Serhan then asked the panelists what universities could do to ensure that they are meeting the demands of the growing population and economy. Dow said California needs to rethink financial aid packages because they don’t do a good job of reflecting the real costs of college, given that they only estimate the costs outside of tuition, such as living expenses, books and supplies.

“Millions of students in California are working adults that have family and obligations, and financial aid has not caught up with that,” Dow said.

Dhanaphatana added that financial aid packages should be more transparent. Many students that actually qualify for financial aid and federal grants don’t take advantage of them because, at 18 years old, they do not fully understand all the costs and forms involved in the application.  Additionally, she argued that private universities need to rethink their spending, given that they are allocating millions of dollars to revamping campus facilities in order to make their institutions more attractive for high school seniors while also driving tuition costs up for their existing students.

“It’s taking away the actual focus of what is important for an undergraduate and higher education,” Dhanaphatana said. “There needs to be a shift in focus on what the universities are spending their time and money on.”

When discussing student loans and how they affect college graduates, Gordon added that a lot of people are changing their career plans to better fit their need to pay off student loans. However, he believes that newspapers are also guilty of hyping up the most extreme cases of what is happening. Gordon said that in comparison to other states, Californians are lucky that their debt is fairly manageable.

Katrina Shebanow, a senior majoring in international relations, said she witnessed the rise in USC’s tuition. Her brother graduated from USC two years before her, and she noticed that her parents were paying much more for her schooling than for her brother’s. Concerned about the rising costs, she asked Gordon what private institutions had to say in their defense. Gordon answered that the majority of the students don’t pay the sticker price for college and that it was more useful to analyze the average cost students are paying, not the total listed price.

Amira Perryman, a senior majoring in international relations, said the event opened her mind about the issue of rising tuition.

“I came into [the event] with a narrow perspective because I am a college student and affected by the issue of tuition,” she said. “It was really interesting to learn about how the issue of tuition affects others and the community.”

After the panel, Jong Su Kim, a freshman majoring in international relations, said that he enjoyed the event and wished it had been longer.

“I wish there were more advertisements for this,” he said. “I have a lot of friends that might be interested in this type of stuff, but they never know about it.”