Brigitte Bowers: College applications and rising UC tuition

By Brigitte Bowers

My eldest son, Casey ,submitted his application to the University of California only two days before the deadline. I thought this was cutting things pretty close, but I was wrong.

About three hours after his application was safely in cyberspace, he informed me that a group of his friends needed his expertise for an application workshop that evening. As the only one in the group to have actually completed the application process, Casey was their expert, God help them all.

The next morning, I sat at Casey’s bedside and asked if everyone had sent in their applications.

“One did. The others are still working on it. Some of them just started. They still have a day, though.” He pulled a pillow over his head. “Can I go back to sleep now?”

After all, it wasn’t yet noon, and he’d had a stressful night imparting wisdom to his less-experienced classmates.

I was a student once, too. I remember those late nights before a paper was due, when, fueled by Pepsi and cigarettes, I wrote through the night and finished just in time to make it to my morning class.

I still tend to wait too long to attend to those tasks I’d rather avoid altogether, but I am nevertheless appalled by my son’s casual attitude toward something as important as a college application. One would think he and his friends were applying for nothing more important than a part-time job at a fast-food chain.

Still, lest you think Casey and his fellow applicants lack the organizational skills and motivation necessary for collegiate success, consider the paper I found on our kitchen table the very day he completed his application.

His friends were still happily procrastinating, sending texts back and forth about how they needed to get started on their college apps just as soon as they were done watching the new YouTube video featuring a dog on a skateboard.

The paper was filled with calculations in my son’s handwriting. It listed ticket prices, transportation costs, and hotel rates, multiplied and divided according to some formula I did not understand. In any case, the sheet was detailed and neat, and it looked like it was part of a careful plan for some kind of trip.

“What’s this?” I asked my son.

“Oh,” he answered, “that’s for Senior Ditch Day. We’re thinking about going to Disneyland.”

“So, you’re telling me that you guys are still working on your college applications two days before they’re due, but you’re making plans for Senior Ditch Day seven months in advance?”

“Yeah, well, we want to do something kind of different for Senior Ditch Day.”

I stared at him until he admitted that perhaps his priorities were a bit skewed. I will confess, however, that I was buoyed by the realization that my son and his friends were capable of planning ahead.

So now that the application is out there, and out of our hands, we begin the waiting period. I do not want to even think about the anxiety of the next few months.

My son applied to seven campuses in the UC system, and each application cost $70, which means that we paid $490 just to apply. That does not include the fees for submitting his SAT and ACT scores and transcripts. We will have just paid off the application costs at about the time he starts getting his responses.

And then, if my son is accepted at a University of California campus, we will try to figure out how to pay for it all. Like most middle-class kids, my son will probably not qualify for need-based scholarships.

But we also do not have the means to pay for an education that will cost us more than $33,000 a year, not including the 5 percent raise in tuition costs implemented each year over the next five years, if the state of California and the UC Board of Regents cannot come to an agreement regarding state contributions to the UC system.

I work for the University of California, and so I am of two minds about increasing tuition.

I understand the need for a robust public university system. UC Merced has benefited our community in ways no other institution could hope to match, and I want the University of California to have the funding it needs to continue the teaching and research that will improve our town, state, nation and world.

But as a parent, I just don’t know how we’ll pay for our son to be part of that process. We have saved some money, but my husband and I are still recovering from the economic meltdown of 2008, and we have not saved as much as we hoped. Casey has worked hard over the years, despite his recent bout of senioritis, and I do not want to let him down now.

So, we will probably end up going deep into debt to pay for our son’s education, and then going into debt even further when our younger son begins tertiary education in four years.

That’s our responsibility as parents, and one we are willing to assume.

And yet, many middle-class parents still will find a UC education impossibly expensive. I can’t help but think that, as tuition levels rise, we may be condemning a large portion of our youth to a stagnant future, one without hope for advancement.

Brigitte Bowers is a lecturer in the Merritt Writing Program at UC Merced.

[Source]: Merced Sun-star