Affordable higher ed is crucial, but so is job-creation

As you may have seen, President Obama today launched a campaign-style bus tour of college towns, calling for changes to the way financial aid works at America’s institutions of higher learning. As Politico reports, the President’s bus tour is part of an effort by the Administration to boost its image with the struggling “middle class” and “reconnect with younger Americans, a key part of his base and a group he’s counting on as his health care law is implemented.”Here are a couple of quick but important points to keep in mind as the President continues his bus tour…First, leaving aside for the moment the specifics of the President’s proposals, it’s worth noting that YG Network recently released middle-class focus group findings that highlight this very issue of affordable higher education. As the Wall Street Journal reported of our findings, participants “in both (Tea Party and Swing) categories expressed concern about the rising costs of higher education, with college loans saddling many of these middle-class households with insurmountable debts.”For brevity’s sake, here are just a few ‘verbatims’ from YG Network focus group participants:

• The debt I am in makes me sick to my stomach… The thought of funding my children’s education seems impossible.”—Tea Party Participant, Phoenix, Ariz.
• “I don’t even know if college is the way to go anymore… Come out with $80,000 in debt and get paid $35,000 a year? Is it ever going to go down?”—Tea Party Participant, Palm Beach, Fla.
• “Higher education is too expensive and putting too much burden on kids. We should focus on community and technical schools to save money; not socially desirable schools.”—Swing Participant, Minneapolis, Minn.

Click here to read YG Network’s memo outlining our focus group findings, and click here to read our more detailed presentation on the findings (higher education findings on are pages 15-17). Earlier this year, a poll conducted for YG Network revealed that nearly nine in ten (88%) Americans favor providing parents a full breakdown of college tuition costs, including 66% who “strongly favor” this proposal. Another 85% favor providing prospective college students with reliable information such as employment rate and potential earnings, according to our poll.

Second, while addressing the exploding costs of higher education is a major priority, the fact is that America’s abysmal economy remains the greatest obstacle to college students and recent graduates achieving their dreams. As CNN Money recently reported, “[m]ore than a third of recent college grads with jobs are working in positions that don’t require a degree. Economists call that figure the ‘mal-employment’ rate, and right now it tops 36% for college-educated workers under the age of 25,” while Reutersreports on America’s “faltering economic growth” as “three out of four of the nearly 1 million hires this year are part-time and many of the jobs are low-paid.” Meanwhile, recentGallup polling data show that President Obama’s economic approval rating has sunk to just 35%.

To boot, Obamacare, which the President and his allies consider his crowning achievement, is making things worse for Americans, especially the young, who are needed to foot its massive costs. In addition to driving employers to cut hours and slow hiring, Obamacare is raising health care costs for young Americans. For example, as The Hillreported earlier this week, “[y]oung people in Colorado will pay more to buy a bare-bones insurance plan under ObamaCare… about 140 percent more than the cheapest policy on the market today.” And speaking of higher education, The Hill also reports today that the University of Virginia is “citing ObamaCare costs,” as it cuts health care benefits, noting that Obamacare “will add $7.3 million to its healthcare costs next year. It indicated that it could face additional costs in the future because of the law’s tax on especially generous insurance policies.”

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