“Wait a minute, isn’t Lawrence a private college?” asks the astute reader with a scrunched-up facial expression signaling confusion and/or discomfort on behalf of the headline writer.
Yes, Lawrence is a private college, which is why we will move very quickly from a provocative headline to nine reasons the nine reasons in the headline require closer scrutiny. (The repetition in the previous sentence is intentional.) The good news is that someone already did it for us. Therefore, in true Lawrence University fashion, we will invoke our honor code and cite our source: the National Association of Independent Colleges & Universities, an organization that, as the name indicates, represents private (nonprofit) colleges. NAICU recently published Nine Myths About Private Nonprofit Higher Education, which addresses each with nine evidence-backed truths overturning some widely shared, and often uncritically accepted “facts”, including this one:
- Private college students typically graduate with $100,000 in debt. News and opinion pieces often reach for the stars when they want a detail to support the point that private college is expensive. But here’s the truth: 3.1% of private college graduates leave with more than $100,000 in loans. (Hardly typical.) In fact, 11.5% have debt exceeding $50,000. The average debt load—and we’ll admit it’s not by any means small or insignificant—is just under $30,000, which, by the way isn’t much more than the average debt load of a public school graduate, as you’ll see in the article.
There are eight other gems in NAICU’s well-researched and well-supported article. We encourage you to consider them as you consider Lawrence University along with other private colleges.