By Cody Miller, special to The Sun
It’s that time of the year again when graduating seniors and parents are faced with the decision of which colleges to choose to attend. As the cost of higher education continues to rise, more students are faced with the burden of figuring out how to afford their student loan payments when they graduate, and parents are crunching the numbers for the household budget to be able to determine if they will be able to pay the bills while paying for their child’s education. There is an affordable option to this dilemma, and that is choosing Rowan College at Gloucester County to start their education.
Community colleges are the unsung heroes of our education system. With Rowan College at Gloucester County, and any county college in the state for that matter, the initial 60–64 credits that you take are transferable to any public, four-year school in the state. Rowan College also has a partnership with Rowan University that makes the transfer process seamless after you earn your associates degree at RCGC. They even have a new program called “3+1,” which allows you to take three years at Rowan College and your fourth year at Rowan University and you earn a bachelor’s degree for under $30,000. If that’s not an affordable education, I don’t know what it. Plus, if a student decides that college is not for them, RCGC is also partnered with businesses with the new Work and Learn Consortium, which offers certifications in the fields of advanced manufacturing, financial services, transportation, logistics and distribution, health care, bio-pharmaceutical life sciences, hospitality, retail and tourism and construction management, which are in high demand in New Jersey right now.
New Jersey in general has a brain drain, and we continue to lose our best and brightest children because they choose to go out of state to attend college. I saw this with classmates that I went to high school with when I graduated Williamstown High School in 2009. Unfortunately, Monroe Township was recently listed as one of the towns in New Jersey with the fewest number of people who have bachelor’s degrees and graduate degrees. I can see why that would be the case, because we continue to see an exodus of students from this state and from town.
With all that being said, it makes sense to encourage our children to seek colleges that are more local and affordable. With what is happening over in Glassboro, and all the development that we are seeing in in Williamstown, we do not want to continue to lose our children. We want them to reinvest in our economy and help build up South Jersey. We want them to start businesses in town and in the surrounding areas.
Recently, Williamstown was rated by LendEDU as one of the best cities in the country to start a small business. All the more reason to keep our children local to help stimulate our economy, invest in our community, create jobs, start businesses and pursue new opportunities. We also don’t want them to be strapped with massive student loan payments that are a second mortgage, which I know all too well as someone who has more than $73,000 in student loan debt.
The point I am trying to make is that we have resources, educational opportunities and so much more in South Jersey, so we should be encouraging our children to stay local. Choosing to start your education at Rowan College at Gloucester County is the right step in a student’s professional life. I made that jump and I’m glad that I did. If not, I’d be more than $200,000 in student loan debt from a $50,000 a year school that I was contemplating attending, and I’d be struggling to afford to live and survive, like most college graduates are today. RCGC is a wise, local choice.
Note: Miller currently works at RCGC as the director of the foundation, which is responsible for funding student scholarships
