Price Tags and Purposes: Counting the Cost of Christian Higher Education
Student debt and other considerations for Christian families
The woes of student debt on much of the American population continue to make headlines. Approximately 45 million Americans carry student debt, or one in seven people. According to Forbes, 92% of that debt is from federal student loans. The average balance of just those loans in 2023? $35,210 per student. That doesn’t even cover loans from private sources, which go to pay for tuition at private schools. Because it’s a reality that a subset of these former students and grads with heavy debt come from Christian colleges and universities, and who have specifically attended those schools precisely because of those schools’ Christian mission. As Christians, we should be particularly concerned with our brothers and sisters in Christ who are bearing financial burdens that affect their lives.
A heartbreaking piece from World in August entitled “Heavy burden: Student loan debt hits some Christian college students particularly hard” points to this. Sarah Richardson graduated from Patrick Henry College in 2021 with an eye-watering debt load of $120,000. She began working in a high-paying national security job immediately after matriculating, but with interest rates climbing, and the high level of debt she accrued while at Patrick Henry, the trajectory of the next years of her life are and will be shaped by the money she now has to pay back.
While Sarah’s experience and those of the other young people in the article point to current financial stress some Christians bear, they also should shape how we talk to prospective Christian college students. Fall college fairs and campus visits are going on now, targeting prospective students who are looking toward college in a year or several. These students have the benefit of time to do some thorough investigating. Our oldest son is looking at what he will do beginning in the summer of 2025, from possibilities ranging from a gap year to attending college, with a fairly high likelihood of said institution being a Christian one. With the hindsight of several decades behind us, my husband Jon and I are starting to review information with him that will help him evaluate what his best options will be. We’re talking about purposes: why attend college? Why look particularly at Christian and Lutheran ones? Why consider public schools? And though the subject is awkward and decidedly not that fun to discuss, we’ve been engaging in some pretty heavy conversations about prices and monetary cost.
First, there are long and varied conversations about how purportedly Christian colleges and universities aim to cultivate Christian confession and community. John Henry Newman, in his famous lectures on “The Idea of a University,” wrote
Just as a commander wishes to have tall and well-formed and vigorous soldiers, not from any abstract devotion to the military standard of height or age, but for the purposes of war, and no one thinks it any thing but natural and praiseworthy in him to be contemplating, not abstract qualities, but his own living and breathing men; so, in like manner, when the Church founds a University, she is not cherishing talent, genius, or knowledge, for their own sake, but for the sake of her children, with a view to their spiritual welfare and their religious influence and usefulness, with the object of training them to fill their respective posts in life better, and of making them more intelligent, capable, active members of society.
This statement fairly encapsulates the purpose of Christian colleges and universities, I think. Christian parents and other adults who understand the importance of Christian faith in life desire Christian institutions to encourage and teach this faith and its application to Christian vocations, from the familial to the professional. How sincerely and practically this plays out, though, is often complicated by mammon, unfortunately—from the institutional structures that require monetary support, and what kind, to how students and families pay for school.
Christian colleges and universities have fallen into inflating and obscuring costs for their students, a common practice in higher education for decades. Dan Currell writes recently that
The top 100 private schools enroll around 500,000 students, while the remaining 2,600 four-year schools enroll about 10.5 million students. For the latter group of schools, market tuition, excluding room and board, is about $15,000 a year. If we add $10,000 for room and board (more in cities, a little less in small towns), we can see that 96% of American college students pay $25,000 annually for tuition and housing. Right now, with some variation here and there, that is what a four-year college degree costs.
This simple fact is nearly invisible, however, because college prices are distorted by a system that deliberately lists tuition levels much higher than what students pay. The practice has caused needless anxiety for millions of families, forced college leaders onto an annual high-sticker-price/high-discount merry-go-round, and distorted our national conversation about student debt.
Read this whole excellent article in National Affairs to understand why it’s so difficult to know exactly how much college costs. This should be a sobering reality for Christian parents like us trying to help our children navigate the glossy marketing of Christian schools, often our own alma maters. The purposes might be great, but how about the financial realities students will be expected to face?
For us, our personal experiences with higher ed costs certainly are shaping how we’re discussing college options with our son. Jon, a first-generation college student, had most of his undergrad college and university costs at public schools subsidized by grants, if I remember correctly. Since he lived in the area and didn’t live in on-campus housing, and in-state tuition was low, what payments he did have weren’t much. His parents didn’t do much for his college experience because it was wholly foreign to them. My parents, both public university graduates, didn’t avoid the money subject as I looked at prospective schools. They wanted me to attend, but they also made it clear that the financial onus was on me. I’d worked hard in school, getting excellent grades and building up a résumé. Unlike my husband, I only visited and applied to schools with some kind of Lutheran identity. I decided to attend Valparaiso University in northwest Indiana. I’d received enough financial aid to pay for the entirety of my first year at Valpo and a majority of the following years, though some scholarships were retroactive—I wouldn’t receive funds until I’d submitted semester grades. So because I hadn’t saved enough before beginning classes or planned any other financial alternative, I took out student loans.
Going into the financial aid office to sign a promissory note was a little like playing pin the tail on the donkey. I remember a blur of numbers, a slightly sick feeling in my stomach, and a quick fumble with the pen to sign my name on a line to get out of there fast. I did not feel like I was playing a game or remotely close to winning anything. I felt like I was doing what I needed to do to make my Christian higher education possible, and it was distasteful and not something I wanted to confront with anything approaching full transparency. I buried the copies of financial aid information in piles roughly categorized as “look at a long, long time from now.”
Aside from that yearly visit to scrawl my signature on ever increasing loan amounts as my financial aid decreased with each year, I didn’t much think about my financial burden. The exception was my senior year, when I roomed with three girl friends in a cute apartment off campus and paid for room and board out of pocket. That was the best real-life financial experience I had during college. I remember sitting in my used car, a gift from my parents the prior year, in an Aldi parking lot just a few months before I graduated. I figured I had about $4 in my bank account to spend on food before my next part-time job paycheck came in, as I’d already paid for my portion of that month’s rent. I giggled a little hysterically, but I made it (for those interested, I think I bought hot dogs made from questionable sources and Ramen).
After graduating in 2004, I worked a summer job at a law firm while finishing plans for our August wedding. My husband was still in seminary and beginning his vicarage, which meant he was still technically enrolled and also collecting a small stipend for the year. Two weeks after we’d moved and married, I began a full-time teaching aide job at a charter school that paid a whopping $16,000 for the year, requiring me to work from before 8:00 in the morning to at least 4:00 in the afternoon, often longer, with no lunch break or any break at all (the students ate in the classroom, and the “extras” like music and gym often required me to supervise an unruly student or two who’d been removed from the class). I considered myself blessed; I’d interviewed with at least four other prospective people who held education degrees, and who knows how many whose applications were rejected before that. I held my newly minted Bachelor of Arts degree in music and English, but no formal education training aside from two boring and mostly paper-pushing classes. I had, though, worked three summers as a camp counselor, guiding and living with a lot of children. So I’d gotten the job anyway. As the fall progressed, the six-month grace period after my May graduation loomed rapidly, and to stave off having to start paying my loans, I enrolled in an online master’s level class. Part of that was me figuring out what I wanted to do next, and as a master’s degree had long been in my plans, it made sense in a degree-trajectory sense. It did not make sense financially.
Fast forward a few years, when my husband was working in his first call out of seminary, where he and we had taken out loans (this was before tuition was covered for future pastors there, a huge blessing to subsequent men). He made something like $32,000 a year for the first few years, and not much more after that. I’d begun a master’s degree in education during his last year in seminary, taking a few graduate level English classes, too, and working two part-time jobs. The English classes led me to switch to a Master of Arts in English program at South Dakota State University, fifty miles from our new-to-us town. That degree was mostly funded by my teaching assistant duties, but I still had a few loans. When I completed my degree in 2009, we were looking at about $110,000 in shared student loan debt.
The next ten years involved an arduous and often excruciatingly hard financial path. Thank God He blessed us with an extremely cheap starter home, worth less than our combined student loans, low costs of living, and an introduction to Dave Ramsey through his book, The Total Money Makeover, which forced us to grow up and tackle the behemoth we’d amassed. We drove older cars, didn’t go on expensive vacations or out to eat much at all, and I learned to budget and literally count pennies. As hard as that time was, one of the biggest burdens was facing our responsibility for the mess. Of course, we could blame those Christian schools that charged high tuition rates and other fees. But most problems in life involve various levels of culpability, and my point here is not to solely blame the schools, though their roles are certainly important part of this discussion. What Jon and I had to live with was the knowledge that we’d promised to repay our loans, and it didn’t matter that our livelihoods were in the non-profit sector (church for my husband) and low-paying education realm (adjunct duties at a state school followed by various online teaching and editing positions for me). We had to pay for what we’d promised.
I still feel vaguely sick just thinking about the stress of those years. The student loan number hung over my head nearly every day, and often more than that. It was so big, and the interest added to it, and our income was so comparatively small, that our progress seemed infinitesimal. But God was merciful. After nearly ten years in our first home, we sold it and used the equity to pay off the rest of my student loans, the total amount having shrunk a sizeable amount as we’d picked away at it. We snowballed the rest of our payments and knocked out the rest of the student loan debt over the next three and a half years, finally making our last student loan payment on January 21, 2020. Dave Ramsey could point to various instances where we were not “gazelle-intense” in our efforts. It is also no small blessing that we were given with six living children in those years, which obviously affected our finances (much more on that later, too).
“It costs much less in the long run to save money than to pay off debts.” This was one parent’s comment on the World article I mentioned before, and I agree wholeheartedly. I also think that it costs much less for students to weigh the merits of attending a Christian college over those of a public school before they make those commitments. Jon had weathered the secularism and hedonism rampant in community college and a public university by attending Luther Memorial Chapel and University Student Center, which had wonderful congregational and other support for Lutheran students. It didn’t replace the yuck he encountered at undergrad, but it provided direction in his personal life which eventually led him to the pastoral ministry.
For me, I knew even before going to Valpo that its Christian label was fuzzy; a school that trumpeted its “independent Lutheran” identity was one, at worst but unfortunately largely in practicality, that was embracing a watered-down confession, where older donors would see the “Lutheran” and hand over cash, and others would see the “independent” and wink and nod at the insinuation of a much more worldly secularization, á la liberal Protestantism. I saw firsthand the typical trajectory of sexual allowances and other unionist and syncretic practices leading to ever more concessions to decidedly non-Biblical beliefs. On the other hand, I studied with world-class musicians and excellent professors, many through Christ College, the honors college at Valparaiso. I made some wonderful Christian and Lutheran friends, many of our relationships forming and growing in our shared confessions that not many other of our fellow students held. But a not so small irony: I’d wanted to attend a Christian university to be in a Christian environment, and most of the valuable confession and community I found was in off-campus Lutheran congregations, notably tiny Resurrection Lutheran where I met my husband while we both studied abroad.
Suffice it to say that our experiences color how we view Christian colleges and universities that our son, and our other children, might attend. Our ideal would be that those who choose higher education attend a Christian college or university because we believe deeply in the importance of Christian education, particularly in the formative years of their young adulthood. At the same time, we see the financial difficulties and, honestly, the weak Christian focus, of many Christian schools. And that tenuous identity makes the cost question all the more important. The real problem with Christian higher education is that the practical cost too often conflicts with its purpose. If young Christians are called to service for God and for their neighbors, how can they do that if they’re drowning in debt taken out to prepare them for such service? And what if they’re not actually being taught to prioritize vocations that require Christian humility?
The answer is that the vast majority can’t. Students working high level national security jobs, like Sarah Richardson, to pay off six-figure debt is hardly the kind of marketing message that Christian colleges and universities want widely publicized—the debt part and the super-white-collar, inside-the-Beltway profession, too. While Christians should consider government service, there are also many, many other vocations available to them, most of which do not pay anything like six figures.
The problems of this modern higher education problem go deeper, too. Saddling students with debt sends an implicit message that the debt is necessary for them to attain knowledge and wisdom, as well as inculcating an expressive individualism that precludes students from thinking seriously about and actively forming families. In “Treat Future Students Like Future Parents, Not Just Future Employees,” Mary Frances Myler writes:
As the locus of formation for millions of young Americans, colleges and universities are complicit in the cultural devaluation of marriage and family. … Universities tacitly discourage family formation, passing on to students the flawed philosophy that enabled the sexual revolution in the first place. This vision of the self, named “expressive individualism” by sociologist Robert Bellah, is that people are defined by their inner self, which they must express and make real to others. As historian Carl Trueman writes, “Anything that challenges [the inner self] is deemed oppressive.” Expressive individualism insists that reality be conformed to the individual will, and it leads students to think that they are fully autonomous and unbound by the so-called oppression of responsibilities, parental guidance, and social structures.
Self-described Christian colleges and universities often fall into this pattern. Usually it’s because they’ve adopted progressive philosophies of education borne out of the Enlightenment and decidedly at odds with an historic and Christian classical model. Even more, student debt of almost any amount is one of the least helpful accouterments in pursuing non-professional Godly vocations in families. Myler makes these key points:
The majority of today’s colleges and universities implicitly operate according to expressive individualism: they suggest that one’s studies and subsequent career are primarily about following passions. While education should certainly nourish a student’s particular talents and passions, universities lack any coherent vision of what it means to be an educated person. Instead, they delegate educational choices to individual students and retain no power to judge those choices.
By positing college education as a project of self-determination, universities no longer have any grounds to embrace a normative vision of education. No relationships—whether familial, cultural, religious, or civic—can justifiably infringe on the atomized individual’s desired course of study. In higher education, as in business, the customer is always right.
This attitude that students know best has led to a tyranny of teenage desire on campuses. The webs of responsibility and duty to others that give orientation and purpose to life become alien to students who are taught nothing but self-determination for four years. They are more consumers in a marketplace than inheritors of a cultural tradition.”
This is the last kind of educational emphasis we want our children to have, and certainly not the one we’d want from Christian colleges and universities. So what are Christians, future college students and their parents, to do?
Why not prepare them for family life as well as for a paying job? That would lead students away from the kind of alumni profiles that bring in yet more money, not to mention contradict the expressive individualism that permeates the collegiate environment. As Myler writes, “Even though students may not always think of themselves as such, it is fully reasonable for universities to treat them as future spouses and parents. Indeed, it is odd that universities instill the knowledge and habits that empower a student to climb the corporate ladder after graduation but ignore the virtues proper to familial vocations.” This is particularly incongruent consistent with the express priorities of college students over the last several decades, who point to “raising a family” as “essential or very important” (see page 53 in “The American Freshman: Forty Year Trends”). And the students who were surveyed weren’t exclusively Christian students, where the emphasis on family would ostensibly be even higher. Christian colleges and universities could fill a particular niche in helping students discuss, study, and plan for family life.
Young women who desire higher education especially need mentors in real-life situations to model what their future lives in families might look like. “Any attempt to encourage marriage and family life among students would be incomplete without acknowledging the unique burdens that young women face when weighing the goods of marriage and family in light of a career,” Myler writes. “Women have entered both higher education and the workforce in greater numbers, but both environments retain masculine norms that often fail to recognize the unique realities of femininity. Work is good, and it is a creative expression of human dignity. But careerism offers women the shallow archetype of the ‘girlboss’ as the model of success, ignoring the reality that most women won’t “have it all.’ … Young women seeking career counseling need to hear from mothers who no longer work, or who work part-time.”
I support this one hundred percent. As a woman who loves my vocations of wife and mother, and who also prioritizes learning, I would love to see more women sharing with younger women the varied and multiple ways formal education, as well as personal, private learning, can and do enrich our abilities to care for our nearest neighbors. And young men need this kind of encouragement, too. Myler again:
For students who particularly desire and actively seek spouses and look towards futures with family, having these conversations and modeling these lives in real life, in real time, over and over again, are vital. … The difficulty of balancing the pursuit of a career and having a family is nothing new; it just isn’t talked about at universities. Starting the conversation would help the students who already know that they desire marriage and a family, and it would open a new horizon to those who haven’t considered these possibilities for their future.
Christian colleges and universities have too readily embraced a fully careerist focus, in part for—surprise, surprise—the monetary gains of such a focus in our secular culture. Alumni who are lawyers and business executives can give a lot more than alumni who are teachers prioritizing Christian teaching and family life or who are homemakers. But if we care about “not cherishing talent, genius, or knowledge, for their own sake, but for the sake of her children, with a view to their spiritual welfare and their religious influence and usefulness,” as Newman put it, we must teach and emphasize the great and abiding blessings of family, too.
Implicit in this discussion has been the value of higher education. Some families might find that other trade routes, or foregoing higher education altogether, might be the best option for their children. Those options hold their own limitations, which I won’t go into here. Nevertheless, the trade or non-school routes are real and, at least what we’ve seen in recent years in some of our circles, more common choices, and they’re worth mentioning.
Institutionally, Christian colleges might look to organizations like the International Association of Christian Education for some collaborative support. As much as intra-denomination support is vital, and the purposes for Christian higher education clear, it can be an asset for institutions to have mutual Christian support. Warren Smith writes in “Solving the Christian Higher Education Crisis,” “IACE [purports to affirm] the unique value of true Christ-centered education to the Christian church. Christian education is not an incidental part of the church and the disciple-making process. It is essential.” This understanding of the crucial role education plays in cultivating Christians isn’t actually common at and in many purportedly Christian colleges and universities. So it might be worth looking at IACE and other groups to find it.
Another option for Christians concerned about Christian higher education is to support new efforts to establish truly Christ-centered schools that are also cost-conscious. Luther Classical College is one such endeavor, and it is set to open in 2025 here in Casper. We are excited to see its development, particularly as its aims echo the ones we discuss with our children. The first bullet point in the description of its mission is “to value marriage and family over career and money.” And as price has been a large part of what I’ve written about here, I appreciate LCC’s goal to set tuition at $8,500 per year per student, which is a much more reasonable and likely accurate cost than much of what other Christian colleges and universities publicize. I’d highly encourage all readers here to take a look at LCC, pray for its mission and ongoing growth, and consider supporting it.
Student debt doesn’t have to be inevitable, even for Christians attending Christian colleges and universities. How families will reconcile Christian higher education’s purposes and prices will require careful and often difficult planning. We don’t want our children making the same mistakes we made.