Students across wisconsin and will help them finish college. I really wondered, will that work . Will it, because theres been studies that indicate that its a drop in the bucket. What make the difference they hope . Spee01 what you did differently from a lot many of the books that i read will take a snapshot. This is the entering cohort and this is a graduate and cohort. They dont look at what happens in between. You did did something different. Talk about the longitudinal nature of your study. Guest to understand how the Program Works i felt like the experience of getting Financial Aid is in a evolving experience. The price you pay for the first year of college is not the same price you pay for the second year of college. Frankly, riegler people know that. It doesnt take experts to tell them that. And meant that we followed the same group of students over the next six years to see how their lives changed and the extent to which their need for resources in the way they use those resources and how the program affected that and how it shifted. We got to see dynamics unfold that i think are commonly missed. Host i think you got to see nuances. That is something that gets messed when youre doing snapshots. You loose all of the in betweens. Most people when they talk about the cost of college think of tuition and fees. Thats what they think of. Your buckle elaborates on what the true cost of colleges. Can you tell me about what it is and the audience about what it really takes to go to college and what it cost . Guest its far more than tuition and freeze. The federal government knows that. And what it listens the cost of attending an institution it includes things like getting a roof over your head and food to eat and transportation. But the conversation keeps coming back to tuition and fees. Thats unfortunate. Tuition and fees are less than half and sometimes only 30 of the total cost of attending college. The real problem students have are the need to pay the rent. To pay the utilities, by food. They cant do those things in the same way in college because they need to spend time in the classroom. It is those kinds of things that we saw that trip to them up over time. It wasnt the tuition and fees. That is one for example they would end up taking out a loan. It wasnt to pay the tuition. It was to pay the cost of living while going to school. Host i think those are the kind of things that people fail to appreciate. I work work in a very large public urban university. It is not uncommon for me to speak to students and have students who truly worry about things like can i pay my metro card which enables them to get to work, school, back home versus can i eat lunch this week. They. They are not just hanging out having fun. Talk a little about the narratives. What you did was distill them into some student individual experiences. Can you talk about that in terms of what the students were struggling with on a daily basis . Guest there are 3000 students in the overall study. It really focuses on six of them to try to help the reader understand what it looks like up close. That was one of my task. These these students have gone through enormous challenges and i want the reader to see them. Consider someone like chloe. Chloe was chloe was a young woman who grew up on a farm in rural wisconsin and had a horse and thought it would be cool when im altered to be able to take care of animals. Which i think is a normal ambition. She went off to twoyear college so she could do that. And while people think that Community Colleges free in this country, chloe is one of those that figured out that was not true. She had very little money. Her family was assessed to be able to only pay couple thousand dollars per year for college. After all of her grants came due she was facing a bill of over 10000 per year. She was asking yourself how my supposed to do that . Just because the federal government says my mom can contribute that 2000 dollars, she cant. Theyre wrong. So chloe sold her horse to go to college. That was the starting point. Host to me that was a pregnant example of the extreme that students will go to because they want that education. Guest she really did want it. I dont think shes anomaly. I think what happens is grandma sell something of the cousins pitch in something, families go families go to Great Lengths to make college possible. Even with that money she wasnt okay. What she did was she knew about Student Loans but wanted to try to avoid them because her mother was struggling with credit card debt. Chloe was afraid of ending up in that circumstance. Instead she took on not one job but two jobs. The. The reason was because she couldnt get enough hours from a single employer. She worked at kohls which is a Department Store in wisconsin and she worked at pet smart which make sense for jews trying to do in school. She found yourself doing those two jobs and doing what reformers tell her to do which is to take five classes at a time. Two two jobs and five classes do not add up. She was commuting back and forth, running all over the place and found yourself falling asleep in class. Again, she knew she was exerting too much energy that she was not doing enough studying. By the time she said this isnt gonna work work for me and i need other money and she applied for student loan they dont just come through immediately. It took more than a month for the loan money to arrive. By that point her grades are so bad she had been placed on academic probation and right now shes no longer in college. She has debt and no degree. Host that is what worries me about students. We talk about the american dream. You talk about it being broken for a group of students. But a student like chloe comes in she is working two jobs, she is doing the best she can trying to contribute at home and there is also some months shame involved in going through a faculty member teacher and saying im struggling, what can i do. I have seen students fall off cliffs before went may be in october they started to try to find some helper lifeline that could move through the system but it overwhelms them and then when we think about what is out there you get minimumwage jobs if you dont have a college degree. As you know from the book chloe joined the navy. That was another astounding thing. Talk a little bit about what our preconceived notion is of the College Experience and how chloes lens was different. Guest when i went to see her after she dropped out and i had to fly from two florida from wisconsin. I did that because in many cases when a student drops out of college that the last time we see them. I wanted to wanted to sit down and see what was going on. What was very clear was that she was having trouble finding work that would pay. In the navy it created a sense of structure and gave her sense that she could at least get that she put three square meals a day and a roof over her head while she was trying to pursue her career. That did not mean that she did not want to be in college. She just knew the College Experience that she had didnt seem to care. The school didnt even care that she was falling short in the other areas. Will i think we talk about 18 yearolds and thats what she was wanting all of this freedom and to go off and have nobody tell them what to do, i dont think theyre actually asking to be completely cut loose and shoved off a cliff and settled with an Economic Situation that puts them at risk. We are telling them to go to school and then resettling them in this way that it really does feel like up the trail. I think thats why put it in the title, we broken their trust. I think that think that something that strikes a cord with me all the time. A lot of public universities are also under resourced or in equitably resourced. If you go to a Different School the ratio of advisers to schools is much better than if you have an advisor and theyre trying to advise seven or 800 School Students and i have many problems. Can i ask you little digression, talk about your own story. When we talked about it you work through college, right . Guest yes. I went to an institution where my mother was an adjunct. For some reason those were the good old days and that meant that i got free tuition at that institution which is amazing. Thats thats a big discount. But my parents didnt have College Savings but in no way did their incomes we didnt even qualify for a. So i decided i would just work and i was lucky enough that working at a restaurant allowed me to pocket enough for tips and i was decent enough as a waitress that i can make ends meet by working 40 hours a week. Sometimes i was cocktail in her doing burgers or pancakes and units year but that, but i was able to do that. The price and the cost of living today are so much higher in the minimum wage is so sad im frankly the tip minimum wage has even gone town because he put tips on a credit card and so you have to pay taxes. But these things no longer add up. While i worked in college and you may have too, that is, that is not going to be the sustainable story. I think thats an important point to make. So many people say i worked through with no problem. But the world is not the same. The cost of rising education and cost of tuition. We are very reasonably priced tuition and even our students struggle. But at a lot of other public tax has been listed on tuition so that looks more like private tuition. And what you talked about first is that first year tuition so the Financial Aid package comes in and you say great. What happens the second year typically. So many schools are givings schools extra granted for the first year of college to get them to come. The family finds out in the second year that grant is not available. Intuition went up. So over time the college basically becomes more expensive with each year that you stay. Students are taken aback by that thats one thing that people need to know going in is that what youre given that first year of College Price tag is not going to be what youre gonna pay in the fourth year. One of the other misconceptions is the fact that the perception is out there that students are spending their financially dollars on fancy restaurants, going to bars, bars, and a luxury that you can imagine. Therefore they are not spending where it is meant to be. I want to read a quote. It struck me, the quote about buying black pants. Which is something uni, and i have grown children and Everybody Knows they need in an interview suit. I just want to quote this and have you talk about it. The quotas come i dont spend it on luxury items. I dont buy stuff that i just want. I actually never really have unless theres a need for it. Three weeks ago i went and got myself some nice black pants which you need for College Business for interviews. It is my only pair of black pants and i got a nice button up shirt because you need to look nice for interviews. Other than other than that it is just deuce for the sorority and stuff that if i need for class or college. I try not to buy food too much. I dont spend a lot on food but i do buy like some applesauce and milk. Just breakfast items. Just breakfast items. I have some snack items, hot chocolate, but no other. Thats it. I can get by without buying luxury items. Hot. Hot chocolate was a luxury item for this young woman. People with few resources which is who these Financial Aid recipients are, have learned for long time how to manage scarce resources. They dont throw things away. There are so many things being said about College Students that might apply to some people but they mainly apply to people whose parents are paying for college who are at elite private institutions where they have the luxury of going to the art museum, having a party are going on spring break. The vast majority of todays undergraduates dont do those things. The data. The data that is being used to paint that picture of those other folks have nothing to do with the data on the Financial Aid recipients. We do not see students spending things in frivolous ways. We did budget logs with them and know what they spend their time on. There are two things that were notable to me. One thing that is never asked about in studies of undergraduates is do you spend times cutting. They never asked do you spend time taking care of other people. We saw lots of people making that time investment. Even if they were working on a pay on a pay job they were working and caring for someone else. That was such an important thing. The other thing was far from being out partying or drinking with the money they are trying to help their families with it. So they were back home trying to make sure that moms bills were being paid. To. To make sure younger brothers and sisters were okay. These are not 30yearolds taking care of their own children. These were 18yearolds taking care of the families that help them get to college in the first place. That to me is another very important point. What you see is an expected family contribution. Talk about the negative financial contribution. I see it see it all the time at city college where i am at. I see students who are paying for helping their grandparents paying for medical costs, really using any money they have to try to get back. And you are not getting financial contribution from the parents because they cant afford it. It. Guest that expected financial Family Financial contribution is typically a fake number. It doesnt take into account one of the most important things in the familys financial resources, their debts. You might decide a family can contribute ask but it is completely ignoring the debt that family possesses. That might prevent them from doing so. In addition, people are working in high school to help their families. When they go off to college, even if it is down the street but they have to spend time at college, the family loses that income. That is that is how we can sometimes reach a negative family contribution. But no negative numbers are allowed in the federal system. So they put the number at zero and so you dont have to contribute anything but they dont say lets give money back to the family which is in fact what the students are doing with the resources. Its a present figure but so many people think at the statistical model and say it doesnt seem to matter very much when were predicting college completion. Well, thats because its a fake number and its inaccurate. An measurement error is a big deal. This is a number plagued with measurement air. Thats disturbing because its a big bureaucratic system. Tell me about that. Thats the thing the other students come in and they say fast for is easy to fill out and i think you need a phd to fill out before. Its a small bureaucratic tragedy. The thing is a mess. But theres. But theres a lot of attention for dealing with the fasfa. Im concerned about what happens after the fasfa. After that fasfa you find out you are not getting enough money and then you find out all of the extra rules. To actually keep your money from yeartoyear you have to do a bunch of things. One is that even if you stay at the same school you have to keep refiling the fasfa every year. Even if nothing has changed. And thats not easy because of the paperwork and ball. Another thing is you have to keep up with something called satisfactory academic progress. If we could explain it that would be great but every Single School has different rules what it means is the schools have students have to get certain grades and complete a certain amount of courses. If you go back to your own expresses in school when a class didnt turn out to be the way it would be in it was too hard, or the professor was terrible, you dropped it. Frankly if you wanted to get a grades up took easier classes too. The strategies will backfire if you are on Financial Aid. So its people doing normal things that most people doing college will cause them to lose their Financial Aid, and nasa price either taken aback. Host and worse and if you drop this course youre going to drop a lower level and if you drop a lower level your Financial Aid will go away. Sometimes they dont have a choice because do i get enough . Or a d when i have a dream to become something that if an d in will not help. Tell me about how your students in the study will debt with those. Guest they dealt with them badly and i dont blame them. Even as a faculty member who students now know that i know some of this stuff and i know it goes on so they bring me their cases. They say Say Something like my dad got sick and i miss school. I miss that class and i think i should drop it. Im aware of the potential consequences and so we weigh them. I can can help them navigate this. These things dont make sense. You should be able to drop a class if you need to without it hurting you too much. So we saw students who literally dropped below fulltime status and all of a sudden parttime pays half of fulltime pace but your Living Expenses are not have. So the whole whole formula for distributing the money is off base. But it usually did was cause them, over time to move slower through college. Thats the last thing you want to see. They were tied you spent in college, the more time it costs. If we want students to go faster we cant tell them to go faster, theyre not stupid. They would love to go faster. We dont set up the conditions under which they can go faster. That is to give them the support. I work at support. I work at Temple University now in one of our programs does something that in my study we actually found really worked. Pay students not to work. Students need money and so if they can get it from grants instead of through working then they can take more classes and work less a meritless distracted, they can spend more time at school. Host is that different than workstudy . Spee02 it is. Its an effort to help students finish in four years instead of five years by taking more classes. Workstudy is a Popular Program and i love saying that because so few programs are popular. Workstudy is the idea that we can provide you with work on your campus. The federal government actually provides the resources to pay for that. So many people take a poke grant recipient should get workstudy. No. I