Paying the Price, Sara GoldrickRab
Paying the Price, Sara GoldrickRab
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Paying the Price
College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream

Author: Sara Goldrick-Rab

Narrator: Vanessa Daniels

Unabridged: 9 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/18/2017


Synopsis

If you are a young person, and you work hard enough, you can get a college degree and set yourself on the path to a good life, right? Not necessarily, says Sara Goldrick-Rab, and with Paying the Price, she shows in damning detail exactly why.

Drawing on an unprecedented study of 3,000 young adults who entered public colleges and universities in Wisconsin in 2008 with the support of federal aid and Pell Grants, Goldrick-Rab reveals the devastating effect of these shortfalls. Half the students in the study left college without a degree, while less than twenty percent finished within five years. The cause of their problems, time and again, was lack of money. Unable to afford tuition, books, and living expenses, they worked too many hours at outside jobs, dropped classes, took time off to save money, and even went without adequate food or housing. In many heartbreaking cases, they simply left school—not with a degree, but with crippling debt. Goldrick-Rab combines that shocking data with devastating stories of six individual students, whose struggles make clear the horrifying human and financial costs of our convoluted financial aid policies.

About Sara Goldrick-Rab

Sara Goldrick-Rab is coeditor of Reinventing Financial Aid: Charting a New Course to College Affordability and has written on education issues for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. She is a recipient of the Early Career Award from the American Educational Research Association and the Atlantic, Slate, and NPR have covered her work. She founded the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, the nation's first research laboratory aimed at making college affordable, and is a noted influence on the development of both federal and state higher education policies. Dr. Goldrick-Rab is professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Roy on June 07, 2020

Soaring rhetoric about the value of hard work obscures the fact that family money has long been one of the best predictors of college success. Among the so-called developed nations, the United States is unique in many respects, not least in higher education. Whereas going to university is either......more

Goodreads review by Jonna on December 02, 2016

A few striking quotes: "failure to complete does not reflect intellectual ability but, rather, an inability to pay" (239) "too many students are dropping out of college because they cannot cover their rent, utilities, childcare, gas, or other critical basic needs" 246 "debt is the symptom, not the dise......more

Goodreads review by Terry on January 16, 2017

Must read for anyone who cares about the future of higher education in the United States.......more

Goodreads review by Brady on September 29, 2016

This is a phenomenal, in-depth look at the way that financial aid functions in the state of Wisconsin and in the United States generally. It is not, as some have suggested, propaganda for free college but a data-driven look at the effectiveness of financial aid systems. Goldrick-Rab does suggest tha......more

Goodreads review by Molly on November 20, 2018

Even though I work in higher education I learned a lot from this book. Some of it was frustrating- e.g. that Ivy League schools with billion dollar endowments receive more work study funds than community colleges where there are more students in need. Some of it was enlightening- e.g how expected fa......more