Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream by Sara Goldrick-Rab (review)

In Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, author Sara Goldrick-Rab explores the college affordability crisis and the new economics of higher education. More specifically, Goldrick-Rab rejects the assumption that if a young person works hard enough, they will be able to get a college degree and become upwardly mobile (“move up the socioeconomic ladder”). Popular explanations of why students do not finish college assume it is to due personal failure such as a lack of resilience, time management, and intelligence. Goldrick-Rab attempts to show that the reason that low-income students do not complete college is because college is too expensive even with various forms of financial aid. The author utilizes a mixed-methods longitudinal study of 3,000 students over six years and includes data collection activities such as lengthy surveys with payments for participation, legal agreements to collect administrative data from public colleges and universities, and fifty in-depth in-person interviews. The book closely follows the experience of six students.

Goldrick-Rab begins her argument in Chapter 1 by historically framing college affordability (specifically how states spend less on public higher education and how the price of college rose), the Pell Grant, and federal accountability. The author notes that colleges that charge $60,000 or $8,000 a year can both receive Pell Grants (p. 16). The original intention of the Pell Grant was for students to not have to take out loans, yet the maximum Pell Grant amount for 2016 is $5,815, which is a small fraction of a $60,000 college cost. In Chapter 2, Goldrick-Rab discusses contributing factors to the cost and price of a college education.. Moreover, what is not included in the federal calculation is basic expenses incurred by family and money they miss in the short term (p. 40). Tuition and fees are not the biggest drivers of college costs, but living costs, transportation, books and supplies, and personal expenses are important. Even if tuition costs are frozen, says Goldrick-Rab, these living costs are not. Hence, freezing tuition and fees costs do not succeed in solving the issue. A strength of Goldrick-Rab’s work is that she uses historical data, quantitative data from the unprecedented study, and the stories of six students to make her points. In other words, it is tough to imagine how compelling this argument might be for public audiences [End Page E-7] without the combination of mixed-methods. Quantitative data can be convincing, but they do not give the same in-depth human perspective one gets from interviews.

Chapter 3 investigates how the concern of over borrowing from financial aid sources rests on the hypothesis that actual costs reported are less than the stated cost of attendance, but this is inaccurate because of rising living costs. What the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) does best is sort between the wealthy and middle class instead of between the lower-middle class and working class (p. 46). On the student end, it can be difficult to understand exactly where the money comes from. Since money moves through financial aid offices to a complicated funding package, Pell recipients often refer to grants as “free.” Goldrick-Rab points out that “for taxpayers’ grants are not free” (p. 60).

In Chapter 3, Chapter 4, and Chapter 5, I am reminded of Matthew Desmond’s (2016) Evicted, which explores the complex lives of Milwaukee’s poor and how seemingly insignificant actions could result in a cycle of poverty and eviction. Goldrick-Rab’s book gives us a glimpse into the lives of low-income students to support the claim that “[t]he study of financial aid in isolation, therefore, cannot tell us how money and scarcity shape the college experience. Only research on money as it is actually possessed and used...