Student loan debt surpassed total credit card debt in this country for the first time this summer, totaling $850 billion, The Coloradoan reported. With student loan debt piling up with tuition prices, students around the country face the issue of how they are going to pay for college, and more importantly, is it worth it?

Members of the Faculty Senate hosted a panel Thursday to try to address this problem. Walter McMahon, Emeritus Professor of Economics, at the University of Illinois, Charles Delman, mathematics professor and Derek Markley, special assistant to the president led the forum.

Delman began with a brief summary of the issue and highlighted the goals of the Illinois Board of Higher Education Public Agenda. He spoke about how state appropriation, tuition and financial aid are all key aspects of funding.

“These policies need to be integrated,” Delman said.

However, in reality, these aspects end up failing to meet the Public Agenda, leaving more than 200,000 students without a college education.

Markley took the floor next giving a brief history of state funded higher education, noting the failures of the attempts.

“(Other states) didn’t want to ask people on the campus. They turned the business experts. There was no common agreement, total lack of consensus. It was a recipe for disaster,” Markley said.

He elaborated on the principle of performance based funding, where the school, that was the best would get the most amount of money, and base plus funding, where a school would get a certain percentage of state money.

Markley said Illinois needs to combine the past policies, not simply repeat or create new ones.

McMahon concluded the presentation by expressing the importance of higher education, including three tables comparing a bachelor’s degree to a high school diploma.

“There’s a huge skill deficit in Illinois,” McMahon said. “Just look at the jobs. There’s a point to be made. Illinois has been falling behind in productivity since 1980 and has continued to decrease.”

He gave numbers that showed how much can happen with a bachelor’s degree, such factors include health increases, longevity increases, happiness increases, and spousal and child health increases, but the money just is not coming.

“There is so much money put into Medicaid, prisons, and welfare that it’s squeezing it out of higher education,” McMahon said.

When his presentation was finished, the panelists opened themselves up for questions from the audience, especially when questioning McMahon’s research on the returns per year with a bachelor’s degree.

“Legislators are looking for something within two months to two years, but we sell (higher education) to last 45 to 65 years, which is education’s biggest problem,” McMahon said. “We have to package it simply and talk about shorter time periods.”

McMahon explained that legislators are too concerned with cost to really working with the real value of higher education, but the three panelists all agreed that this issue is not hopeless.”

Jacob Swanson can be reached at 581-7942 or

jjswanson2@eiu.edu .