Angela James told her boyfriend not to vote for Ronald Reagan, but like most people, especially most young men, he did anyway.
”Now he`s real mad,” said the 20-year-old junior at Iowa State University. ”In the first place, he`s a farmer and the farmers are having all sorts of troubles. And now he might not be able to come to college here next year.”
As Angela James explains it, her boyfriend, Steve, and his family own ”a lot of land” near Clinton, where her father drives a truck and where she put herself through two years of community college by baby-sitting and working at a pizza place.
All that land may give him too much wealth, on paper, to qualify for a Pell Grant to help finance his education. And with the Reagan administration trying to limit the number of guaranteed student loans, Steve just isn`t sure that he`ll be able to scrape together the roughly $5,000 a year for four years that an Iowa State degree will cost.
”He`ll probably come,” James said. ”He wants to go into ag-business. But it`s all a little uncertain now.”
For college students and would-be college students all over the country, at least for those whose families are not wealthy, lots of things are a little uncertain now, thanks to the administration`s continuing effort to cut back on student aid plans.
That uncertainty helps to illustrate one of those major changes in American life that happen without anyone quite noticing it.
In a series of seemingly unconnected laws passed in the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government made it possible for just about any qualified student to go to college. Not to Harvard, Northwestern or Stanford, perhaps, but to one of the increasing number of increasingly high-quality state universities around the country. By combining some personal savings with federal grants and federally guaranteed loans, even the child of poor parents could afford to go to college.
Because this reality just grew, without ever being decided, most people weren`t really aware it existed until it was threatened. What threatened it was, and is, the Reagan administration`s desire to give and lend money to fewer students, as well as giving and lending less money to students who remain in the program.
In the view of educators such as Jerry Sullivan, Iowa State`s director of financial aid, these proposals threaten to bring about another of those changes that may not be noticed for years.
”I`m afraid we`re institutionalizing a lower class,” said Sullivan, pointing out that it is the students from lower-income families who have been hit hardest by the cutbacks.
”It isn`t just the money,” he said. ”The government is making it more and more difficult for a family to apply, with more complicated forms. And who is the kid most likely not to understand what`s going on? The kid from the poorer, less educated family.”
The student aid cutbacks may be one reason the percentage of black students in colleges is dropping, though Sullivan said Iowa State is maintaining its minority enrollment through aggressive recruiting.
What Sullivan and others fear is that further cuts will lead to a situation in which the children of wealthy families can go to elite private colleges, children of upper-middle-income families can go to state
universities, and others will have to go to their local community colleges, or nowhere.
The unpopularity of the Reagan proposals his been evident in their cool reception by Congress, which only in 1981 gave the President very much of what he wanted on student aid, including a ”means test” for student loan applicants whose parents earn more than $34,000 a year. Since then, moves for further cuts, including this year`s plan to limit any one student`s total aid to $4,000 a year, have been ignored on Capitol Hill. The House last week passed, 350-67, a $10.6 billion for college aid next year. Action by the Senate on its own version of the spending authorization is expected early next year.
Meanwhile, the Reagan proposals and the uncertainty they have caused have reduced the popularity of the President and his party, even on this generally conservative campus, which supported him last year.
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”I voted for Ronald Reagan even though I disagreed with a lot of his policies because I thought that as a person he was morally strong,” said Kevin Engles, a 23-year-old graduate of Iowa State who now wants to go to law school. ”But somewhere in there, the priorities are maybe a little screwed up. I used to be a Republican, but that`s when I thought Republicans beleived in investing in the future.”
Investing in the future through education is an old Republican tradition, as Iowa State proves. The Republicans who ran Iowa`s General Assembly established the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm here in 1858, and in 1864 it became a land-grant college under the law sponsored by Republican U.S. Rep. Justin Morrill of Vermont and signed by the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln.
To the current Republican administration, though, students putting themselves through college at federal expense are often undeserving and unwarranted beneficiaries of federal largesse.
When this year`s cutbacks were first proposed, Education Secretary William Bennett said that they ”may require from some student divestiture of certain sorts: stereo divestiture, automobile divestiture; three-weeks-at-the- beach divestiture.”
Bennett`s intention was to paint a picture of students as high-living young ingrates whose pleasures were being subsidized by the taxpayers.
No one disputes that some of this goes on, even at a relatively no-frills school such as Iowa State. But Sullivan insists that ”students are working today, most of them have part-time jobs,” and while some have cars (many need them to get from work to class and back), few are living the fancy life.
According to Sullivan, it costs an in-state student $5,050 to go to Iowa State for a year, up from $3,900 four years ago. Back in 1981-82 a student from a low-income family could get $2,400 in grants, so assuming he or she could save about $900 a year from part-time and summer work, only about $1,000 would have to be borrowed.
That same student this year, Sullivan said, would have to borrow at least $1,800, meaning he would owe $7,200 after graduation. ”And many owe more than that,” he said. ”Some kids leave here owing $12,500. That`s one reason so many of them go right for the big-paying job. What would you do if you wanted to be an elementary school teacher and you owed $12,500?”
What no one knows, or can know, is how many young people are not here or at thousands of other campuses because of the cutbacks and the threats of future reductions.
”The main reason kids don`t come to school, or return to school, is financial,” said Sullivan. ”Sure, some kids have abused the student loan programs, some don`t make the payments. But you know, we`re trying to give people the opportunity to succeed. Some aren`t going to make it. That`s the risk you take.”