The Sundance documentary Ivory Tower investigates the college industrial complex — and comes to some sobering conclusions.
Andrew Coffman/Ivory Tower
In the Sundance documentary Ivory Tower , Andrew Rossi (who previously directed the New York Times doc Page One) explores how the cost of college is changing the lives of an entire generation — for the worse. College costs have risen by 1,120% since 1978, far outpacing the rise in the cost of food or health care. Once seen as the necessary price of admission to the professional class, college has become, for some young people, a hugely expensive albatross that even death cannot rid them of: Private student loan debt is passed on to survivors.
"That is practically a Dickensian construct in 21st-century America," Rossi said in an interview on Tuesday in Park City, Utah.
Andrew Coffman/Ivory Tower
Unlike most other debts — including foreclosures and credit card debt — student loans cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. "I think that President Obama understands that the higher education system needs a very full overhaul," Rossi said. One of Rossi's interview subjects is a young New York City women who has over $140,000 in student loan debt from her undergraduate and master's degrees in geography; in the film, she can't even get a job at Starbucks.
So should less practical majors be restricted only to the rich?
"If tuition rates weren't so high, and you could study English, or art, or philosophy, then you would be able to have a job afterward that would pay off a modest amount of student debt," said Rossi. In the absence of lower tuition, though, Rossi said that students need to be more realistic about their future earnings potential. "Any discipline of study should be valid, so long as the realistic earnings that one can have from that career will pay off the debt one is incurring."
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