Students today have a vast amount of options for where to obtain an education, which allows us a lot of flexibility in finding schools of different sizes, cost, and locations. It’s a great advantage for some, but can create quite a lot of stress if you aren’t exactly sure how to assess which school will set you up best for post-graduation success. Students, especially those from underserved or underrepresented backgrounds, need data that clearly explains graduation and career success rates for people like them. In order to create a generation of leaders and innovators, today’s students need to make more informed decisions on which paths will lead them there.
As a 17-year-old, I did not have nearly enough knowledge of federal loan programs, extra college fees, trends in increasing tuition costs, or credit transferability to make the best possible decision when considering the investment I was making in paying for school. Institutions of higher education sometimes provide a cost calculator on their websites and some even provide financial aid estimators. These tools can be helpful in estimating front-end costs, but they do little to educate on what life after graduation, or dropping out, would bring. It only takes a few clicks for a student to receive thousands of dollars in loans, but some can end up repaying them for decades afterward. Once on campus, students have a lot to manage — jobs, internships, community involvement, all on top of classes — so often times learning about our interest rates, repayment options and potential loan forgiveness programs come as a harsh reality after graduation. Colleges need to be more transparent when advertising their costs by also informing prospective students on the costs that go along with repayment.
I can’t speak for every low-income, first generation, minority college student in America, but I know these words resonate with a lot of my peers. While we know we need to take the reigns of our own success, we need to be empowered to do so, and it is clear that there is a lot of information that needs to be made available before students can make a decision that will impact the rest of their lives and those close to them. What we need right now is better data, more of it, and to have it in a transparent and easily digestible form.