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Amy Fried is a retired political science professor at the University of Maine. Her views are her own and do not represent those of any group with which she is affiliated.
While he does not appear to see things this way, Rep. Jared Golden is a lucky man when it comes to college costs.
He had parents who, in his own words, were able to “put big money on the table, borrowing against their own assets to help fund college for their kids.” An awful lot of Maine parents can’t do that. In the fall of 2020, 40.5 percent of students at Maine public colleges and universities were the first in their families to go to college and college graduates earn more than people with no or some college.
I had full-time students at the University of Maine who were working many hours so they could send home money to help support their families. Some were struggling to cover basic needs, like food and housing. Students with these challenges sometimes can’t finish college, leaving them with significant debt and a lesser ability to pay it back.
These are not the sort of situations Golden would have regularly seen when he worked on his college degree.
Golden went to Bates College, which has a rather elite, high-income student body. More than half of students at Bates went to private high schools and only 12 percent are first generation college students. Bates has a low percentage of low-income students and a significant endowment to cover full family financial need. According to the Institute for College Access and Success, a far smaller share of Bates alumni have debt than UMaine ones — 33 percent versus 72 percent — and, on average, Bates students with debt owe $10,000 less.
To be sure, as Golden notes, he and his wife have a mortgage and car loans and student loans. However, with his congressional salary of $174,000 a year and his wife working as an attorney at a prominent Maine law firm, they have a combined family salary far above the median household income of his congressional district, which is $59,676 and the national median income of $74,464 for people with bachelor’s degrees.
Yes, Golden also was helped in covering his college costs because he made the noble sacrifice of serving our country in the Marines. But let’s not overlook that, to engage in this service, one has to be healthy, young enough, be able to leave one’s family for long periods of time and not have disabilities. That makes serving in the military not nearly as viable a choice for people who are trying to better support their families, like a man who’s trying to retrain after working in a factory or a divorced waitress and single mom.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing from Golden about student loan relief that shows he knows that his college experiences are so different from the more typical Maine college student. In fact, his initial reaction after it was reported a group he belongs to received money from student loan behemoth Sallie Mae was to engage in name-calling and later to tell those who have been striving that “a rich life is not always the result of the accumulation of more and more financial wealth.”
Those sorts of comments, along with what looks like a lack of recognition of the experiences of most of his district’s college students, graduates and people who had to drop out of college, is really what bothers me about what Golden said.
In fact, I agree with him that student debt forgiveness policies should be narrowly tailored and that it’s essential to make college affordable. One step would be to have states cover the same share of costs of public higher education costs they did in decades past, thus decreasing the share paid by parents and students.
It could be that these remarks are a political win for Golden as a Democrat in a district that Donald Trump won twice.
But, I believe, being a really good legislator requires better listening — both for understanding his constituents’ needs and for negotiating with other legislators to pass good bills — than what Golden has shown here. I sincerely hope he takes the opportunity to do so.
