The rates of university admission in Arizona have skyrocketed in recent years, as have the number of students who qualify for some form of financial aid, including students at Arizona State University’s Downtown Phoenix campus.
In fact, 94 percent of public university students in Arizona accept some kind of aid, according to a study published by the Arizona Board of Regents.
Oftentimes this aid comes in the form of scholarships and “gift aid,” which students do not have to pay back. At ASU, students received $1.6 billion in student aid, an increase of about 62.6 percent over the last six years, according to ABOR.
But for many Arizona students, this aid comes in the form of loans. And sometimes, these loans are quite large.
“Nobody should spend even a quarter of their life paying back bills for education,” said Yacoub Al-Sakkaf, a senior at ASU Downtown majoring in journalism and mass communication.
He did not have to borrow massive loans to pay for school; Al-Sakkaf is from Kuwait and the country’s Ministry of Higher Education pays for his tuition.
But Al-Sakkaf knows people who have taken out loans and still struggle to pay for their education.
“I have friends who have to take two jobs at a time just to pay their tuition,” he said. “It makes me feel horrible … this is education we’re talking about!”
But it’s not all bad news. The ABOR study also found that Arizona’s public universities (ASU, University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University) are actually more affordable compared to the national average and that student loan default rates among university graduates in the state are lower than many other states in the country.
Even though there are far more students in Arizona public universities than there were in 2012, many of whom receive financial aid, many low-income students are kicked out of the running long before they reach college.
Nationally, only 14 percent of low-income students earn their bachelor’s degree, according to a 2015 study done by the National Center for Education Statistics. For middle-income students, that number is 29 percent. Among wealthier students, 60 percent earn a bachelor’s degree or higher.
This is a problem because educational attainment is linked to higher-paying jobs.
College Bound AZ is a nonprofit organization looking to turn these statistics around for low-income, academically high-achieving young people.
The program, which follows students as they navigate the challenges of higher education, acts as a “bridge between high school and college,” said co-founder and executive director Elizabeth Paulus.
Not only does the program assist its students in the application process and through their four years in school, but it also helps connect recent graduates to employers in an “interface between employer and student” called Handshake, a program through ASU.
According to College Bound AZ’s numbers, 80 percent of program members go on to find jobs within 90 days of graduation.
“Clearly (underserved students) need additional resources … so they can stay on track and finish,” said Paulus.
College Bound AZ has made strides since its inception in 2009, but some students continue to struggle, even with the extra help. Sometimes students will fall behind academically and lose their scholarships.
This is the dilemma for at least three students in Paulus’ current cohort. After being placed on academic probation and losing access to their scholarships, these students have to pay at least some tuition out of pocket before they can register for classes.
Without access to funds immediately, these students have dropped out of school until they can pay their student account balance.
“I don’t think our community knows that much about what’s going on with this population of kids,” said Paulus. “They’re doing the best they can and yet there’s a struggle.”
This is not to say that there aren’t highly successful college students from low-income backgrounds.
Joaquin Ramos, a junior studying criminal justice at ASU, comes from a modest household in Nogales and is a first-generation college student.
But for Ramos, who is an Obama Scholar, money wasn’t the issue—fitting in was the problem.
“Something that definitely helped me was to find a core community,” said Ramos of his first few months in downtown Phoenix. It was ASU’s SPARKS program, a student-led organization that provides resources and information to promote higher education to aspiring students, that helped Ramos his freshman year.
Ramos said the problem comes down to a lack of education early on when it comes to financing college. When he went back home one summer, Ramos taught his younger brother and friends how to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).
“If my brother didn’t have me, he wouldn’t have been able to figure it out,” he said.
Contact the reporter at Madeline.Ackley@adu.edu.
Madeline is the community editor for Downtown Devil and is a senior studying at the Walter Cronkite School. She is a local freelance journalist who primarily covers politics, policing, immigration and business. In 2019, she won first place in her category in the national SPJ Mark of Excellence Awards for her reporting on deported veterans in Tijuana, Mexico with Cronkite News.
