Loan cuts hurt grad students, future

[OhioChick]

Originally Published: 2 hours ago

A bleak outlook lies ahead for current and future graduate students. Because of the debt ceiling deal reached by Republicans and Democrats in Congress last week, for next year and the foreseeable future, there will be no more federally subsidized loans for graduate students.

This forces students to take a hard look at themselves and re-evaluate if graduate school is the correct decision for them and not just a way to delay entering the workforce. While that’s a decision that students need to make on an individual basis, the decision made by lawmakers unfairly removes support for graduate students at a time when we as a country need to be looking to become better educated than ever.

If we’re going to advance as a country, we need academic researchers and scientists leading the way. But will a new group, one on the cutting edge of all available technology, be out there if they can’t even take out federal loans? Did we just cut the professors, researchers and business leaders of tomorrow at the same time that we’re trying to “win the future?”

That’s a counterintuitive approach to reaching a nationwide goal of better-educated individuals.
And it’s not even grants — money graduate students don’t have to pay back — that got the axe. Despite the fact that, come hell or high water, the government was going to get its loan money back, there was still a choice made to cut federally subsidized loans.

More: http://www.statenews.com/index.php/article/2011/08/loan_cuts_hurt_grad_students_future

[ChromeFoundry]

1. Just like shooting yourself in the foot. n/t

[Igel]

2. The loans don't fall evenly on all grad students.

They hit professional students hardest per year--they have higher tuition/fees and seldom get grants or scholarships. Esp. lawyers. It's bad that doctors are hit, though, because it just makes it less likely that there'll be GPs without huge debts.

They hit "soft" disciplines next hard: Art history, for example, has few TAships, few scholarships/grants/RAships, and very long average time to degree. So you pay less per year than professional students, but you're on the hook or 8-9 years. It adds up. English, languages, geography, history, poli sci live on TAships (and, for English, having grad students teach "freshman comp").

Engineering and sciences have far more RAships, at least at Tier 1 schools. These students don't always get the jobs they wanted; but they invariably get jobs in a tech field, using some portion of their specialized training.

I've watched departments where I went to grad school graduate 2-3 PhDs per year, with 10-15 jobs per year. Since there are dozens of Tier 1 departments doing the same, that makes for 35-40 PhDs, minimum, in any given year. I've watched PhDs in tech fields get jobs tangentially related--PhD in electrical engineering getting a job requiring a lot of math for equipment and software design validation. I couldn't feel sorry for his $80k/year entry-level job.

It's a fairly open secret in most humanities/social science departments that they graduate far more PhDs than the market can bear. It's a secret vehemently denied in most departments as far as they're concerned--few poli sci departments like to admit that they overproduce PhDs. It would destroy their reason for existing.