Talk is cheap – unfortunately college is not

So I opened my newspaper the other day, and there was the face of another college mom, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, staring out at me in her reassuringly funky, rectangular glasses.

She’s sent a daughter off to college herself and found the whole process mysterious, confusing – and expensive. She’s vowing to get to the bottom of it.

At first glance, I felt just as her PR people would want. Yay! Another college mom. Surely I can trust her to solve this mess.

Besides, I read in the Washington Post that her daughters have called her something of “an anal retentive chowderhead.” I can relate.

But then I read on.

I came away fairly certain I’d enjoy dialing her Blackberry, arranging to meet over a latte to compare notes on dorm e-mails and care packages. But I’m just not certain Margaret’s willing to fight for the tough solutions to the problem.

Washington students paid 52 percent of the costs of their education last year, compared to 25 percent in the late ‘70s, according to the Higher Education Coordinating Board. At the University of Washington, tuition and fees rose 82 percent over the last 10 years.

It’s as though government and higher education have decided that baby boomer parents and their kids harvest Green Bluff orchards of money trees in their backyards.

To truly reduce the burden on beleaguered lower- and middle-class families and students, states must kick in more money, and the federal government should increase Pell grants to cover a higher percentage of in-state tuition.

Instead, Spellings focused on adding standardized tests for state universities, tracking students’ progress through a national database and simplifying the process of applying for federal student aid.

Her approach sounds rather like nagging a high school girl to study her vocab words when it’s her calculus grade that’s plummeting. The bottom line is this: The sticker price on higher education continues to multiply faster than the songs on a freshman’s iPod.

Spellings strikes me as a no-nonsense mom. Yet she complains loudest about the difficulty of tracking down information about American colleges and universities.

Has she never heard of U.S. News and World Report? The Princeton Review? Or even, for heaven’s sake, “College Planning for Dummies”?

The trickiest part, for all but the wealthiest families, involves coming up with the cash. Good grades, an amazing three-point shot or a passion for tuba-playing can help.

I remember learning all of this the hard way. One private college looked intriguing until the admissions rep coolly reported it did not believe in merit scholarships. That was code for, “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

Public universities offered to waive $250 here or there, and private colleges presented an inexplicable maze of packages, some of them charging full freight, others shaving off thousands.

It was confusing, and it remains expensive, and yet our middle-class family can only be counted as lucky. I’ve taught writing classes at local colleges in recent years, and I’ve been stunned by the frantic lives many working-class students live, simply to find a way to both go to school and survive.

The days when an industrious student could work his way through college by slinging hash in the college cafeteria are long gone. I’ve watched students struggle to stay awake after delivering pizzas or tending bar late into the night. They’ll juggle a full-time job, or two jobs, with a full class load and huge student loans. Their health suffers, and often so do their grades.

Way, way, way too many of this country’s policies have been devised to bolster production and promote consumerism, and way too few have been designed to truly enhance the well-being of the people who live here.

This is my eighth year in a row of paying college tuition. The end is in sight.

But for all those American students to come, that education secretary in the hip-mom’s glasses needs to sharpen her vision.