UMD overlooks the real graduation problem

BY APRILL EMIG | Managing Editor | $38,705. That’s how much I owe in student loans.

Like 85 percent of students who take six years to graduate college, this number is average. While UMD is working to encourage the “on-time” graduation rate, it’s more complicated than telling students to take the right classes.

I never imagined it would take me this long to graduate. I assumed I would end up on the four-year path like everyone else. What I didn’t realize is that I wasn’t like everyone else—and “everyone else” wasn’t the monolith I thought.

Students today are more diverse and, more importantly, many come from low-income backgrounds. College used to be the way for these students to change the course of their families, to stop the cycle of generational poverty and to make something of themselves. This is hardly the case now. Not only has the cost of college skyrocketed, the cost of living has too.

I’ve been working full-time (over 40 hours-a-week) the entire time I’ve been in college. I received grants for being low-income and won a few scholarships, but I still had to take out student loans. All of the money I make from working goes directly to paying rent, bills and other necessities. My parents certainly can’t pay for that—it’s the reality of going to college after growing up in poverty.

Reading reports like the one submitted by “UMD Student Retention” (where I got the 85 percent figure mentioned above) is frustrating. It’s hard not to feel as though I’m a failure for taking six years to graduate, as if someone could have counseled me to do something different. It’s true that I could have graduated a semester earlier, or not double-majored, but it’s my education and I wanted to get the most out of it. It’s not like I’ve lacked work experience.

The reality is that only 11 percent of low-income students will graduate college within six years, according to a study by Postsecondary Education Opportunity.

It’s important to know what low-income actually means. It’s not about being “poor” in college (sorry, but your inability to afford a new pair of shoes isn’t the same as not being able to afford decent food). It’s about being from a family that is in the bottom-quartile of annual income. This typically means a family making less than $33,000 a year.

However, this is not to say that middle-class families don’t struggle to afford college. That issue has been well documented, from students whose families look like they’re rich “on paper” to setbacks like parental layoffs. These are difficult and sensitive issues that can hopefully be solved if there’s ever a college cost overhaul.

While it’s not necessarily a competition of who has it worse, it is disheartening when many significant barriers are overlooked simply because they aren’t experienced by the majority.

For example, I failed my first year of college at Anoka-Ramsey—not because I was busy partying, but because I was taking a full academic load while working full-time overnights. I couldn’t afford quitting the job, and I didn’t think scaling back at college was the answer. I especially didn’t want to drop out of college with the hopes of going back “later,” knowing that it’d only get harder if I put it off.

While it would have been great to have someone tell me my options (as a first-generation student, my parents had no idea how college worked), it wouldn’t have changed much of the reality of my situation. I still would have had to work. I still would have had to take classes. I’ve learned much better time management skills since then, which has helped, but the stress and isolation of it all wouldn’t have been easily fixed with a quick check-in from a well-meaning adviser.

If we are going to see serious changes in the graduation rate, these issues need to be addressed. We need more people in positions of power who know what it’s like to be a low-income student. We need frank discussions about why it takes us so long to graduate.

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