Throughout the country politicians of all ideological persuasions are now arguing that a combination of economic calamities has shattered the expectations of the middle class, including its assumption that it can afford to send its children to college. Politicians in Illinois recently had a chance to make the goal of higher education widely available, but they passed it up.
Edgar’s aides vehemently deny that. “This wasn’t partisan,” says Dan Egler, an Edgar spokesman. “The governor had good fiscal reasons for vetoing the bill.”
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The impetus for Quinn’s program is clear: the wages and salaries of most people can’t keep pace with the rising cost of college tuition. With room and board, the yearly bill for college students at private schools can go as high as $20,000. The tuition at state schools is lower, but also on the rise. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for instance, annual tuition is now almost $2,500; for the Chicago campus it’s a little more than $2,000, one of the state’s lowest rates.
The crisis is most severe in poor communities. After a decade of aid cuts by the Reagan and Bush administrations, the number of low-income students applying to colleges has declined. But federal cutbacks have also hurt those middle-class families who make too much money to qualify for low-income assistance yet not enough to pay tuition without going into debt. “For these people,” says Quinn, “the escalating cost of college tuition is a problem that needs a solution.”
“When your child turns 18, you can withdraw that money to pay the full cost of four years of tuition at any state college or university,” says Quinn. “What makes this program different from others is that we guarantee to cover tuition payments at state schools.
Quinn counters that there’s little chance the fund would go bankrupt, since it would be scrutinized by outside auditors every year. “You have to think of it as an insurance program. Yes, college is not for everyone. And accounts may be opened for children who decide they don’t want to go to college. But most people would like to know that money will not be an issue when their child makes that decision.”
Edgar’s aides contend that the governor did too read the bill. “The problem that the governor saw with this account is that you had no guarantee that the money you paid in would cover the cost of tuition,” says spokesman Dan Egler. “If tuition costs rose faster than expected, the state would have to make good on all these guarantees and bail the fund out. There were a number of Democrats who raised questions about the bill–it wasn’t just Republicans who were against it.”
