Yasmin Youssef wants to be a doctor but can’t afford a university education just yet. So she attends Parkland College, a Community College in Champaign, Ill.

She’s an international student, but her parents just bought a house in Illinois, which will make her an in-state student. That will lower her tuition enough to attend the University of Illinois.

“My parents are not going to pay $30,000-plus a year, so it’s something I have to do,” she said. “(Parkland) was considerably cheap ... and that’s a lot better for me.”

But college is not unaffordable just for Youssef . Many students face the same problem. Students ranked higher education funding as one of the top three political issues – right alongside the war and the economy – in a survey conducted by I-ELECT, a political reporting project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Furthermore, the survey found that many students said they, or those they knew, had seriously struggled to pay for college.

With tuition rising, and aid either stagnating or slashed, students and their parents are having a difficult time affording a college education. Jennifer Delaney, a policy analyst for the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, said a study by the center concluded that more federal aid is necessary for students to minimize debt.

“In general, the nation is no longer measuring up in terms of affordability, but measuring down,” Delaney said.

The average cost for students at a four-year school has been rising steadily – from $7,673 in 1997 to $9,199 in 2002, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. About 55 percent of undergraduates received some type of financial aid in 2000, averaging $6,206 each year, according to the statistics center.


Federal help
Megan MacLeod, a senior at the University of Illinois, works about 30 hours a week at two jobs just to make ends meet. And she has to do that even though she receives financial aid.

“‘Affordable’ is not a term I would use to describe college these days ... When the majority of the students I know are working two jobs, and a few of them are working three jobs just to pay for it, it can’t be,” she said. “One just isn’t cutting it anymore.”

MacLeod received grants and loans this year to help pay tuition and rent, but she said she would like to have more grants so she would not have to worry about paying back large loans.

“When there’s not a lot of grants, you tend to end up having a whole lot of loans,” she said. “Students are 21 and 22 years old coming out of college, and they have thousands and thousands of dollars worth of debt. That’s not the best way that you want to start out your life.”

The Federal Pell Grant – a major source of free dollars for low-income students – has increased by $300 per student in the last three years. For this school year, the maximum award is $4,050, but some say the cap still must be raised.

“Everything goes up: tuition, rent, fees, etc., but you keep that past Pell Grant there, and yes it’s affecting (college affordability),” said Victor Martinez, associate director of the financial aid office at the University of Illinois. “Students may have to work more.”

Others agree. “On the federal level we need a consistent commitment to grants. The maximum Pell Grant has been slack for the past three years,” said Melanie Corrigan, assistant director for policy analysis at the American Council on Education, a group representing many of the nation’s higher education institutions. “More students are in need of Pell Grants, and we need to fund them at greater levels.”

Martinez said a surge of funds for the Pell Grant – such as the $1,000 increase George W. Bush has proposed – would help low-income students, but he is not sure it is feasible.

“You want to increase (it), but where is the money?” he said. “It’s a nice gesture, but until it happens, it’s just a suggestion.”
Other options to help students pay for college could include offering a tax credit. John Kerry has said he would want allow up to $4,000 to be deducted from taxes.

Kerry has proposed free tuition for students majoring in education, provided they commit to work for two years in impoverished schools after they graduate. His plan would be similar to the Golden Apple Scholar program in Illinois, in which students get a yearly $5,000 scholarship for agreeing to work for five years after graduation in needy schools.


Alternatives to Federal aid

Becky Bynard, a senior in early childhood education at the University of Illinois, had free tuition her freshman year because of a scholarship. The next year, she had none and spent half her savings paying for school. She had saved the money for years from Christmas presents, birthday gifts and paychecks as a nanny.

“Over half of my money was gone by that point, so I was freaking out,” she said. “How (was) I going to pay for the next two years with only half the money I have?”

Bynard’s family income is too high for her to qualify for government aid, but her parents do not pay her tuition. For those students, the price of education might still be steep, but they are left to search for money on their own, said Martinez, the University of Illinois financial aid associate director.

“They need to find private scholarships,” he said. “It’s easy to say, but it’s not easy to get. But if you never apply, you’ll never get it.”

The next year, Bynard got a teaching scholarship. To get money for her senior year, she applied for 20 awards. She received two.

“My goal is that I graduate with minimal debt, and I worked really hard because I applied for all that I could,” she said.


State funding
As the price of higher education has gone up, states – Illinois in particular – have continued to cut the amount of money passed on to universities. But states need to increase their contributions to higher education, said Corrigan of the American Council on Education.

“We need a strong and consistent commitment from states ... not to shift the cost to the students and family,” she said. “We need stable, growing and consistent aid.”

For fiscal year 2004, the Illinois Board of Higher Education, which submits budget requests to the governor’s office, wanted $163 million more but got $85 million less, according to board data. For fiscal year 2003, the board asked for a $147 million increase but lost $99 million.

While state funding of human services has risen 47.6 percent since 1990, higher education funding has dropped a half percent, according to state statistics.

In Illinois, some funding for the Monetary Award Program, which provides more than $4,400 each year to the neediest students, also was cut, Martinez said. That left universities having to make up the difference in tuition grants.

Meanwhile, class sizes have continued to grow and university services – computing labs, numbers of courses and other programs – have been scaled back or cut entirely.

But Don Sevener, a spokesman for state higher ed board, said the picture might not be as bleak as it seems.

“Public universities and community colleges are seeing a steady stream of increased applications,” he said. “At least by that it means many people feel that it is affordable and are willing and eager to get into college.”