Make college affordable.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Oregon has received a grade of "F" for college affordability three years running from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, but this year's failing grade has lost its sting.

The grade didn't take into account one of the 2005 Legislature's proudest achievements - a 78 percent increase in funding for the state's main need-based scholarship program, the Oregon Opportunity Grant. Next year's grade should be better. But pushing the grade up to a sub-par "D" or even a passing "C" isn't good enough. Oregon's goal should be to ensure that every qualified student can afford to enroll in a two- or four-year college.

Making and keeping such a commitment would, of course, benefit thousands of students who now find themselves priced out of a higher education. Making college affordable, however, isn't a handout to low-income students and their families. It's an investment in the state's future, one that would yield predictable and measurable returns in the form of higher incomes, increased tax revenues and reduced demand for social programs.

The state Board of Higher Education recently examined what it would take for Oregon to make higher education affordable to everyone. The answer was a surprise: This goal could be achieved with a doubling of its spending on its main need-based scholarship program, the Oregon Opportunity Grant.

The grant program's current cost, after last year's increase, is $77.6 million for the current two-year budget cycle. If Oregonians spent $150 million every two years on opportunity grants, they would be able to promise every child that financial barriers would not block the way to a college degree.

Increased grants would not pay all of students' tuition and other costs. Indeed, the state board envisions the opportunity grant as a means of filling the gap that remains after other sources of support - money from summer or part-time jobs, family funds and federal financial aid - contribute their share. The Board of Higher Education calls it the "shared responsibility model."

A fair sharing of responsibility for college costs, the board reasoned, requires that students do what they can to pay for their own educations through savings, borrowing, work or some combination of all three. That's not as easy as it used to be.

In 1965, students at a four-year college could pay their costs by working 22 hours a week at a minimum wage job - difficult, but not impossible, particularly with full-time summer work. Last year, a student would have had to work 49 hours a week, year-round, to pay for college - a work schedule that leaves no room for study.

Borrowing to pay for college can also create a heavy burden. Currently, three-quarters of students take loans to pay tuition and living expenses, graduating with debt loads averaging $18,000.

The board concluded that it is reasonable to ask students to support their educations by working 14 hours a week year-round, or full-time in the summer and 10 hours a week during the school year. A manageable debt burden, the board found, would be $2,750 a year for a student seeking a four-year degree.

Many students' families can help pay college costs. Indeed, under the shared responsibility model families with incomes greater than about $60,000 a year would receive no state or federal aid, and even families with substantially lower incomes would be expected to pay a some portion of costs.

The model further anticipates that students would take advantage of federal aid programs available to students from families with incomes of $40,000 or less.

All these expectations make it clear that the shared responsibility model would provide no one with a free ride. Students and their families would have to be prepared to make sacrifices for their education.

Even after making those sacrifices, a portion of the cost of attending college remains unpaid. That's where the Oregon Opportunity Grant comes in.

The grants would pay the last increment of expenses - as much as 20 percent for students from low- and middle-income families. The appealing feature of the shared responsibility model is that it provides the final dollars, after all other sources of financial support had been tapped.

Gov. Ted Kulongoski has said he supports doubling the Oregon Opportunity Grant program, and fully implementing the shared responsibility model, over the next two biennia. Doing so would allow an estimated 2,000 additional students to enroll in universities and community colleges.

Doubling the grants also would send a message to every eighth-grader in the state that by the time they graduate from high school, they'll be able to afford college.

Of all the reasons high school graduates have for not continuing their educations, an inability to pay is the most dismaying. Financial barriers to education cause a waste of human potential - a waste that results in personal and social impoverishment. Those barriers can be torn down in Oregon for a relatively modest amount of money.

A grade of "F" for college affordability has been an embarrassment, but it should improve. The real embarrassment would be to continue receiving low grades when the means to improve are close at hand.