College tuition costs closing door on upward mobility for all but rich

My primary goal as a child was to become financially independent even though I was born with cerebral palsy.

I knew I could not be a policeman like my father, a fireman like my Uncle Del or Teamsters like my Uncles Tom and Danny because I was a child with a disability.

Acquiring a marketable skill and knowledge by earning a college degree was my only pathway to independence.

So even though I went to segregated orthopedic schools in the 1950s, I did well enough in school to be sent to non-segregated Osborn High School for the 10^th grade in 1960. At that time, I told Principal Harlan Holt I would not go into a room that said: “Handicapped.” He gave me an elevator key and let me leave my classes five minutes early to get to the next class. So I suspect I began what later was called “mainstreaming.”

I did well enough in high school to win a scholarship to Wayne State University. I was on my way.

But now, some 50 years later after being a wordsmith at AP, UPI, and The Oakland Press and a rights advocate, I have seen that children with disabilities are not getting the chance I had to attend college.

And sadly, the same is true for those students who are able-bodied and in the lower or middle class because the cost of college tuition and room and board per year for in-state freshmen is between $15,000 to above $20,000 at MSU, U-of-M and Wayne State. Even Macomb County Community College charges in-county students $89 per credit hour or nearly $1,100 per semester for 12 credits to be a full-time student.

Fewer are acquiring the knowledge needed to emerge as the next Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, or Bill Gates because colleges have turned into profit centers and not necessarily places primarily of higher learning.

In so doing, we have eliminated not only the next generation of innovators and workers needed to keep society humming but made it impossible to achieve upward mobility, the concept that brought millions to our shores.

For those students with disabilities, only 50.6 percent graduate, according to a September 2012 Kessler Foundation study while the graduate rate for able-bodied students is nearly 90 percent. In addition, the jobless rate among America's 54 million people with disabilities is at least triple the rate of the able-bodied, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Sadly, far too many students often are saddled with $80,000 to $100,000 in student loan debt that can never be erased by a bankruptcy filing and will hang around their necks like millstones forever.

Someday a scourge such as polio will reappear, killing and paralyzing tens of thousands and it will go unabated because a potential Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, wasn’t around because he couldn’t afford to study medicine and virology. This is hardly what my father and uncles fought for in World War II.

Jerry Wolffe is the Writer in Residence & Advocate at Large at Macomb-Oakland Regional Center. He can be reached at 586 263-8950.