Old Willamette U

There is a small liberal arts university in Salem Oregon named Willamette.  It was the first major step in my process of breaking away from my parents and becoming my own man.  While I only spent my freshman and my senior year there I look back now at Willamette with great fondness.  My classes were small and personal.  My professors cared deeply about what they taught and the environment was one of intellectual growth.  Willamette is a little treasure built around a winding creek that flows through the campus.  It is an oasis of old trees, brick buildings and Oregon history nestled in the shadow of the Oregon State Capitol. 

I studied history and politics.  I worked for a State Senator in the capitol writing letters to consituents and researching policy.  Most importantly, Willamette was a university that pushed its students to write.  Somewhere in the endless term papers and essays I learned that writing was the most important skill I would ever have.


In the midst of my four year college education I traveled to one of the great capitals of the world where I lived for a year.  I called Vienna, Austria my home as I studied in one of the most important centers for art and music in the world.  I lived on the line between the West and the East and was able to keep one foot on each side.  My weekends took me to East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.  This was a time when Communism ruled the day.  I spent Christmas traveling in Egypt and Thanks Giving in Italy.  My parents did what they could to help me yet in the end I still ended up with what I felt was a mountain of debt.  I owed the banks thirty thousand dollars and it took me ten years to pay it back.  All the while I never regretted it.

The experience took sacrifice on the part of my parents and myself.  It was four years of time that is largely responsible or making me who I am today.  My son is now a freshman in high school.  In a short three years it will be his turn.  His turn to find himself, his turn to become a man.  I want to give him the opportunities that I had yet I fear in my heart I will never be able to.

I have started to explore the cost of university studies that would lead him on a similar course that I took.  This summer I am considering driving him on an exploration of the Northwest and passing through the campus of old WU.  Maybe my son would want to attend my alma mater.  Maybe he would want to make it and Europe a part of his life.  If not I am sure he will have his own dreams.  He wants to be a marine biologist and is in love with the University of California Santa Barbara one of the best schools in the nation for this.  In an effort to help him on his way I started to assess costs.  Financial aid calculators and numerous websites later I determined that a single year at Willamette or UCSB would cost more debt then I incurred in four years of college.  Thirty thousand a year plus graduate school.  My son could conceivably graduate with an education debt of close to two hundred thousand dollars.  This and no promise of a job.  On the contrary, he faces a job market more difficult than at any point in my lifetime.

I wanted to cry.  I tried to be responsible.  I have saved for him since the day he was born yet a stock market run into the ground by Wall Street has left me with less money than I would have had if I had simply put the cash in a shoe box.  By the time he graduates from high school I may have accumulated fifteen thousand.  Fifteen thousand dollars, not even a semester.

Of course there are alternatives.  He can live at home and attend the University of South Carolina.  Yet as a father, my heart breaks.  I simply want him to have what I had yet the decline of the middle class and the costs of higher education are putting my realities beyond his reach.  Rest assured my son is no slacker.  He is ten times the student I ever was.  He is teaming with intelligence and creativity.  He challenges himself academically in ways I never could.  Despite this, some where at some point in time this nation we call our home has failed him.  It has put his dreams dangerously out of reach.  As a parent I simply want my child to have what I had yet fear the day when I will have to look him in the eye and tell him that wish, that reality will not be possible for him.

How did this happen?  Where did we go wrong?  Why is this society doing this to our children?

These are the questions that keep me awake at night and I fear if things don't change will do the same to my son.