College Costs To Double By 2020; Start Saving Now And Consider Black Institutions

Jet, Dec 4, 2000

If you think the current cost of a college education is high, don't look for things to get any better in the future.

A new study released by UPromise, a service that assists families with college savings, says that if current trends persist, college costs will more than double in the next two decades, making the average annual tuition bill at a four-year college more than $31,000; elite institutions would cost more than $71,000 in the year 2020!

The really bad news is that many families are not prepared to finance the high cost of education. The solution is to save now and later apply for scholarships and grants.

Blacks should "start saving early and encourage children in every way to study hard and be competitive so that they can have a better chance of getting scholarships," advises Vivian Tillman, operations supervisor of admissions and orientation services at Spelman College in Atlanta.

The UPromise study found that nearly two-thirds of parents with children under age 18 not only failed to save a single dollar for college in 1998, but also failed to save money for any purpose, including retirement.

"Families are clearly not saving enough for either their children's college or for their own retirement," said study co-author Dr. Joseph Stiglitz, professor of economics at Stanford University and former chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. The study looked at the impact of paying for college on family finances.

In addition to saving early, Tillman suggests that Black families consider Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) like Spelman, which was ranked No. 1 in the 1999 DayStar list of top 50 colleges for Blacks in Black Enterprise magazine and No. 5 in the nation of the 100 best college buys in 1998 by Money magazine.

HBCUs offer a curriculum that's often comparable to other universities and usually at a more affordable price, and tend to have a smaller student-teacher ratio.

"The larger universities tend to have more money to offer and more access to funding, but it's really easy for kids to get lost in the shuffle at the big colleges," Tillman observes. "At Spelman we have only 2,065 students, so it's small enough so that we can look at the whole student, and we are interracial. We have students from over 45 other states and 19 foreign countries, so in addition to a strong Black experience, they get an even broader experience interacting with people from around the world."