Gullixson: Some hard lessons for today’s students

Let’s be honest. Many California students are being set up to fail.

I don’t mean top students, the ones who stress over the low acceptance rates of UC Berkeley and UCLA and the high cost of Stanford and Harvard. Students who come within sniffing distance of those schools will have no problem finding universities that will give them a top-notch education and prospects for high-income careers. And they will probably get a fair amount of financial assistance along the way as well.

No, I’m talking about those at the other end of the spectrum, for whom getting a bachelor’s of arts degree is not a guarantee - maybe even graduating from high school is an uncertainty - but for whom getting a good enough education to ensure a decent job and income to afford a home and a family is, at least in the back of their youthful minds, a priority.

The truth is, there are far more students in the latter category. (Less than one-third of adults in Sonoma County have at least an undergraduate degree.) But two stories this week raise doubts as to how committed we all are to seeing them succeed.

First, without much attention, the governor lowered the value of a high school diploma in California last week by canceling the state exit exam. This allows all those who failed the exam as far back as 2004, but who otherwise meet graduation requirements, to get diplomas.

Yes, there are good arguments for why the governor had to do this. The recent canceling of a test date had left those still trying to pass in limbo. But it also underscores the failure of a one-time grand initiative to try to ensure that a high school diploma in California means something. Most students take the test in their sophomore year and pass it with ease. It basically assures that students can function at an eighth-grade level in math and a 10th-grade level in English. At one time, that was not enough for Santa Rosa. In 1997, when Santa Rosa City Schools was committed to “Project Achieve, “ a 10-year mission to improve schools by raising standards, the school board wanted to require seniors to pass a local, and more difficult, exit exam before being allowed to graduate.

But due largely to conflicts over what the district would do to ensure second-chance help - and more - ­for those who failed, the district eventually deferred to requiring students to just pass the state exam before receiving a diploma. Then in 2010, the Santa Rosa district, the lone holdout in Sonoma County on this requirement, even backed down on that, dropping the requirement to pass the state exit exam. Even though fewer than 100 of the 1,800 seniors in the district at that time had yet to pass the test, some considered the requirement to be unnecessarily harsh.

Really? The pass rate last year was more than 97 percent. We make people pass a written test and a behind-the-wheel test to get a driver’s license. Why is it so difficult to do it for a high school diploma?

The harsher lesson for some of these students, I fear, may come later when they enter the job market only to find themselves unprepared for a work world where they don’t hand out trophies for just showing up and doing the bare miniumum.

Meanwhile, some students will seek to further their education only to face another problem that threatens the future of young Californians - student debt.

A Government Accountability Office report in August found that nationwide, the amount of student debt, which was at $50 billion 15 years ago, has climbed to ?$1.3 trillion. And, according to the Education Department, some 6.9 million Americans with student loans hadn’t made a payment on their loans for at least a year. But that only tells part of the story. A recent analysis of federal data by the Associated Press found that school loans increasingly belong to Americans older than 40, something that is now impacting the ability of families to finance the next generation of students. In other words, kids are being told there’s no money for college because their parents are still paying off their own loans.

The AP analysis found that people over the age of 40 account for more than one-third of the total education debt. The bottom line, according to the AP analysis: Student debt has surpassed the cost of groceries as a primary expense for many families. And for younger families, that’s a gap that’s widening.

Meanwhile, those who decide to seek loans for their own education could be setting themselves for even greater hardships down the line, particularly if they turn to less-than reputable universities or for-profit colleges rather than a local community college. Recent research shows for-profit schools such as University of Phoenix as well as schools with larger percentages of low-income students are among those with the lowest loan repayment rates.

Although for-profit schools enroll only about 12 percent of students nationwide, they account for nearly half the students who default on loans. For students who received loans to attend the University of Phoenix, more than half had not touched their principal after five years. Overall, the same is true for more than 700 other colleges, many of them small schools with high numbers of low-income students. Nearly all of these same colleges, however, remain eligible to offer students federal financial aid, according to the New York Times.

As the mortgage crisis dominated political debates in 2008, this is gearing up to be prominent issue in the 2016 presidential campaign. As it should. Students considering attending these kinds of colleges need to be skeptical about the claims they make in their advertising. Many of them are less interested in helping students as they are in helping themselves to the student’s financial aid. It’s just one of many harsh lessons ahead for young students.