Students Struggle Through the Great Recession
By Frank McCoy
This past summer, Alfred Kimbro, 18, was ready to matriculate at The Ohio State University’s College of Engineering. He, his mom, who has two jobs, and his father, an independent tractor-trailer driver, had arranged to cover his first year’s in-state tuition through grants, an OSU scholarship and the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).
Then, just before school began, Kimbro found that he needed more than $2,000 for meals and housing. The family was so focused on tuition that they hadn’t considered those expenses, and Kimbro says, “I was really bummed about it. I had turned down other schools that were going to give me more money, because I wanted to go to OSU.”
His story, with variations, is a common tale. The financial difficulties that NSBE members and other students face are threefold. First, tuition rates are rising rapidly — at an average rate of 5.6 percent a year, according to the College Board. Second, students’ support systems have been battered by the Great Recession. Its long lineup of problems — including layoffs, furloughs, underemployment, reduced working hours and salaries, and high unemployment among blacks — crimp the ability of friends, relatives and communities to provide traditional financial support to aspiring and current students.
These problems ride atop another issue, as the Kimbros found out, when a student is the first family member to attend college. She or he, and family members, may be unfamiliar with the financial pitfalls and opportunities at colleges and universities.
To succeed, students must be knowledgeable and proactive, and exhibit self-control. If they can make it into and through undergraduate school, all is possible.
Tough Choices
NSBE National Secretary Brenda Nathan, 23, understands the tough choices students confront to stay in school. She has made them. Last fall, she transferred from California State Polytechnic University, where she studied mechanical engineering from 2006 to 2010, to the engineering program at the City College of New York.
Several issues drove Nathan to the East Coast. California’s budget problems had made classes more expensive: Tuition in the Cal State system increased 22 percent for the fall 2011 semester. To save money, Nathan took engineering classes at Riverside Community College in California. She says CCNY became attractive because it provides a better financial aid package, and there is a wider array of classes in her discipline.
But the deciding factor was the tuition. Nathan has $14,000 in loans from Cal Poly and says she cannot afford to be in college for more than two more years.
“I know I will be paying my loans off before I can even start my life after school,” she says.
In this weak economy, the fact that undergraduate engineering students have better job prospects than many others buoys them, but they have to receive that diploma first. As a result, Nathan says students are more serious now and feel constant tension.
Nathan says her cousin, for example, a high school junior who wants to study engineering, is already stressed about tuition.
On a lighter note, Nathan, who hopes to use her engineering her skills in the medical field, concedes that students have become more frugal and clever. Some have maxed out their credit cards paying for books, as she has. But networks of students are sharing PDFs of the books required for class.
“We all know how to hack a book,” she says.
Grad School for Free
Today, graduate students are in the best place financially, for the most part. NSBE member Anikwenze Ogbue, 27, past president of NSBE’s Baltimore Metro Alumni Chapter, works full time as an engineer at RK&K Engineers, LLP, a multidisciplinary consulting firm. He is also a part-time student at The Johns Hopkins University working toward a master’s degree in technical management in 2013.
On the job, Ogbue specializes in rail, transit and transportation, and only takes a couple of JHU classes per year. His master’s degree is being paid for partly by savings and partly by his employer. Ogbue, who has an undergraduate degree in civil engineering, has also agreed to remain with the firm for a set period of time after graduation.
But before that deal was secured, the Toronto, Canada, native sought out scholarships. He likes his present arrangement better.
“I don’t have any new student loans, and I want to keep it that way,” he says.
The most fortunate engineering graduate students are those with high grades and solid internships who want to go straight into graduate school for either an M.S. degree or a doctorate. That’s because they have the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science, Inc. (GEM) on their side.
Michele Lezama, GEM’s executive director and a former executive director of NSBE, says her employer is the one-stop, complete resource for funding an engineer’s dream. Its Getting Ready for Advanced Degree (GRAD) Lab program tells students why they should go to graduate school, how they should apply and how a graduate school application differs from an undergraduate one.
The U.S. has developed a number of resources to compete with India and China for good students. Using these, GEM provides full funding for national fellowships, particularly in engineering, that include tuition, all fees and a $16,000 stipend.
“Students have to know that if they are qualified to be accepted into a STEM Ph.D. program in an applied science, that graduate school is essentially free,” Lezama says.
What happened to Albert Kimbro? OSU’s minority engineering program helped him find a federal loan he wasn’t aware of, and now he only owes $500. Plus he has an on-campus work-study job.
“Now I am not worried about financing college,” he says.
If only it were so easy for every student.
Frank McCoy covers business and technology for www.TheRoot.com.
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