The cost of a college education is increasing. Officials say though that it’s money well spent. They say planning ahead and applying for grants and scholarships early on can help make a college education more affordable for South Dakotans.
Education officials say last year there were more than 5-thousand new students that applied to attend South Dakota higher education institutions.
Paul Turman is the Chief Academic Affairs Officer for the South Dakota Board of Regents. He says those students received an average of 58-hundred dollars in loans, and 38-hundred dollars in grants and scholarships. He says the average college tuition today in South Dakota is more than 8-thousand dollars.
“A lot of people are probably looking at the cost of college today and saying, alright, am I going to benefit from four years down the road – the investment I’ve made in a degree. And I think the one thing we recognize is that South Dakota is not going to continue to grow unless we have more and more students who are willing to go on and get associate degrees, technical degrees, bachelor’s degrees in the areas that we certainly have a very high need for in this state,” says Turman.
Turman says some of those high need areas are teachers, nurses and physicians, and welders - and he says, South Dakota college grads are finding work.
“I mean our unemployment rate for people with a bachelor’s degree is well below two-percent, and so there are jobs and those jobs are well-paying, and so I think make the right choice to pursue education in some way, despite the fact that the cost of education is going up – you will recoup those costs very quickly over the lifespan of your career,” says Turman.
Turman says last year graduates ended up with an average of 25-thousand dollars in student loan debt, but he says South Dakotans can help bring down the cost of a college education by taking appropriate classes while in high school, having a plan for the future, and applying for grants and scholarships early because most institutions tend to make some of their most significant awards early on in the process.