Al Franken: My plan helps Minnesota families pay for college

By Al Franken
Duluth News Tribune

The great promise of the middle class is about more than just security. It’s about the opportunity for success. It’s the idea that if you work hard, you can give your kids a better life than your parents gave you.

More and more, that better life requires a college degree. The average salary of a college graduate is almost double the average salary of a high school graduate.

But that better life has gotten further and further out of reach for Minnesota’s middle class as the cost of college skyrockets.

One young man I met in Mankato is going to school full-time, working 40 hours a week - and still selling his blood plasma to cover tuition.

He’s not alone in struggling to pay for college. Here in Minnesota, public college tuition is twice the national average. And tuition at the University of Minnesota Duluth has nearly doubled since 2000. If your kid decides on St. Scholastica or Carleton or Macalester, it’s even worse: Tuition alone at those three schools has risen to an average of $33,500 per year.

That’s a tough mountain to climb - and that’s if you only have one kid!

Not surprisingly, those who graduate often do so with a crushing burden of debt. Minnesota has the nation’s third-highest percentage of college graduates carrying debt at nearly 80 percent - and the average debt they carry is the nation’s fifth-highest, jumping by more than $6,000 during U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s first three years in office.

Meanwhile, this administration hasn’t been on the side of Minnesota families trying to send their kids to college, and Norm Coleman hasn’t been on our side, either. He cast the tiebreaking vote for a Bush budget that included the single-largest cut in student aid in history. And a few months later, he voted to cut off student aid for 82,000 Minnesota students and their families.

It’s time to recommit ourselves to helping every Minnesota family afford a college education.

So I’ve proposed a new $5,000 college tuition tax credit I’m calling the Ticket To Success tax credit.

The Ticket To Success tax credit is generous. It covers up to $5,000 for each student in a family - the taxpayer, a spouse, or a dependent - and can be taken for four years.

It’s flexible. It works for any postsecondary education, public or private, graduate school or community college.

It’s simple. Instead of having to choose between several smaller credits and figure out whether you can take them, there’s one easy-to-use tax credit.

And it’s available to more families. It applies to families earning up to $200,000 per year, including many two-income, middle-class households currently excluded from the credits.

We could pay for this tax credit six times over by allowing only the Bush tax breaks for people earning more than $1 million to expire.

We raise our kids to believe their hard work can open any door, and we live our lives to make that true.

And for every middle-class family, there¹s a moment. It happens during your kid’s sophomore or junior year of high school. You’re on a college visit, maybe it’s the first school, maybe it’s the 10th. (And if it is the 10th, you have my sympathy!) But somewhere on a quad or in a student union, your kid will turn to you and you’ll see the look in her eyes. It’s that hopeful, anxious look that says this is the place. This is the door. This is the door that leads to opportunity, to a better life, to the fulfillment of that promise.

You’ll remember, in that moment, every extra hour you worked, every dinner out you skipped to save money, every night you pushed your child to finish her homework while you juggled bills next to her at the dining room table. All of it - the SAT prep, the applications - has been leading up to this moment when your child finds the door she wants to walk through to a life full of possibilities and prosperity.

I’m offering this proposal because, at that moment, you want to say yes - yes, we can give you the key to open this door.

Franni and I put two kids through college. We understand what that moment is like and what it means. It is a defining moment for any parent, any student, any family.

The great promise of the American middle class is the one I grew up believing in St. Louis Park. My brother and I worked hard to earn the opportunity to go to college, the first in our family to go. That opportunity made my life possible.

Franni and I are so lucky to have been able to give that opportunity to our kids. And I want every Minnesota family to be able to do that, too.

Al Franken is a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Minnesota.

The Duluth News Tribune published this column on October 23, 2008.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 19:01 and is filed under From Al's Desk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.