Free The Time of Our Lives by Tom Brokaw Page A

laundry, social activities, or myriad other costs of just living.
    So if an insurance broker, school principal, or factory manager is making ninety thousand dollars a year and hopes to send his or her two kids to the local state college, more than 20 percent of the family’s gross annual salary disappears the day they’re accepted.
    The College Board, which oversees higher education testing and monitors college trends, conducted a study showing that a full 10 percent of 2007–08 college graduates had borrowed forty thousand dollars or more. That’s more than two hundred thousand college graduates with more than forty thousand dollars in debt as they start careers and, perhaps, families. How does that affect their ability to buy a home, finance more education, or raise a child?
    These debts were accumulated just as the economy went into free fall and jobs disappeared, many of them not to be seen again. Students emerged from commencement exercises with a diploma and a debt load that made them an instant credit risk and a burden for their parents or prospective mates.
    We simply must find a way to make higher education more efficient and more affordable.
    Consolidation is a logical place to begin.
    THE PROMISE
    The concept of higher education for everyone, with community colleges, state colleges, and universities, would remain intact but the horse-and-buggy constraints would go away. We’re a highly mobile society now, so why remain wedded to the constraints that define so many of our institutions?
    The University of Washington in Seattle has a world-class medical school that serves that state and aspiring physicians from Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana as well, sparing those three states the expense of building duplicate institutions. Why shouldn’t, say, North and South Dakota, Iowa, and Minnesota find a way to conflate their medical schools so duplicative costs go down and resources are spread more evenly for more efficiency? Curiously, much of the resistance to the consolidation of schools and colleges is rooted in conservative rural areas where legislators and voters demand fiscal efficiency in every other form of government.
    I have no illusions about the political difficulty of deconstructing what has been in place for so long. But if education is to be America’s best offense and defense against global competition, hard, big, and bold choices have to be made.
    Here are two realities that cut across all our hopes and expectations for improving education and its societal benefits in America.
    Poverty: During the Great Recession, the number of homeless children exceeded one million. Almost one in five kids lived in households at or below the poverty level. Those are not conditions disconnected from fulfilling the promise of education. They have to be addressed as well.
    School term: The time for the nine- or ten-month school term has come to an end. If American education is to measure up against global competition, time spent in the classroom or in some form of learning environment must be extended. In a society where more and more families have both parents working, we have a vast population of unsupervised kids disconnected from adult supervision and from the discipline of learning for two to three months a year. Education experts call that the “spring slide,” when students, especially those in lower socioeconomic groups, lose a lot of what they learned during the academic year.
    Nonetheless, the idea of extending the school term is not popular among parents. Most polls show the opposition running about two to one. A variety of reasons are offered, including interference with family vacations and the experience young people gain at summer camp or while working a summer job.
    Here’s a suggested start: Extend the school year to eleven months and make the eleventh month morning or afternoon only. For teenagers who need to earn income during the off-season, bring employers into the equation with tax credits for