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Literati is pleased to be the bookseller for Sara Goldrick-Rab’s visit to Ann Arbor. Sara is the author of Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, and this event will take place in Schorling Auditorium at the University of Michigan’s School of Educaiton.

For the last decade, sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab has been studying what happens when economically vulnerable people try to make their way through public higher education. Of the 3,000 young adults she tracked who began college in 2008, half dropped out, and less than one in five finished a bachelor s degree in four years. Additional grant money helped some, but what is clear here is that when college students costs are not fully covered, they rarely finish college. If they do, it takes them longer than it should, and they graduate with a substantial amount of debt.

In addition to marshaling her data and national data, Goldrick-Rab also adds a human dimension to this story. She focuses in on six students in particular to help make plain the human and financial sometimes to the dollar costs of our convoluted financial aid policies. Their stories really drive the point home. Though Chloe Johnson, an aspiring veterinarian, sold her beloved horse, took out loans, shared an off-campus apartment with a friend, and worked two jobs, she ends up dropping out of college. She had to work so many hours at Kohl s and PetSmart often the night shift to pay for her Expected Family Contribution that she could not stay awake in classes and still did not have enough money for food or gas. When she finally dropped a class to help her performance in other classes, she found out at the end of the semester that her reduced load made her ineligible for financial aid. After leaving school, she still owed thousands of dollars; she had nothing to show for her college years but debt.

Goldrick-Rab closes the book with possible solutions, from changing the timing of FAFSA forms, to more flexibility about how students can use aid money, and she makes a strong case for making the first two years of college free.

“Paying the Price is an urgent and necessary text. Through rigorous research and careful analysis, Sara Goldrick-Rab shows how the American Dream is structurally compromised by the exorbitant costs of higher education and a thoroughly dysfunctional financial aid system. With texture and subtlety, Goldrick-Rab spotlights the journeys of students whose road to educational access and social mobility is obstructed by the current crisis. Equally important, she offers a practical and progressive action plan forcreating a more fair and just system.”–Marc Lamont Hill, author of Nobody: Casualities of America’s War on the Vulnerable, From Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

Sara Goldrick-Rab is coeditor of Reinventing Financial Aid: Charting a New Course to College Affordability and has written on education issues for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. She is a recipient of the Early Career Award from the American Educational Research Association and the Atlantic, Slate, and NPR have covered her work. She founded the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, the nation s first research laboratory aimed at making college affordable, and is a noted influence on the development of both federal and state higher education policies. Dr. Goldrick-Rab is professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University.

Literati is thrilled to be the bookseller for the Zell Visiting Writers Series at the University of Michigan. More information about the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, including a full calendar of visiting writers, can be found here. The November 3rd installment of ZVWS will feature alumni Donovan Hohn and Rachel Richardson.

Donovan Hohn is the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, A National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Knight-Wallace Fellowship. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Outside, among other publications. His book, Moby-Duck, was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Prize for Excellence in Journalism, and runner-up for both the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. A former features editor of GQ and contributing editor of Harper’s, Hohn now teaches creative writing at Wayne State University and lives with his family in Ann Arbor, where he is working on his second book.

Rachel Richardson is the author of two books of poetry, Copperhead (2011) andHundred-Year Wave (2016), both selections in the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times, Guernica, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, the Poetry Foundation website, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Richardson is a contributing editor at Memorious and directs poetry programming for the Bay Area Book Festival. She lives with the writer David Roderick and their two children in Berkeley, California.