Why So Expensive
College is said to be some of the best years of your life. The parties, the freedom, and the new experience help you find new friends, hopefully a career and yourself, but rising college cost are having young adults stressing instead of enjoying the college experience. Every year less and less states are giving their college’s money and more and more students are asking for financial aid or taking out student loans.
The more that college tuition continues to rise the more of a financial toll it will take on students family and the more debt students trying to earn degrees will accumulate if we don’t try to find a way to get the state and government to help with college costs. For public colleges and universities the price of education rose 14. 1% more than the year before and for private schools it rose 6%, but is the economy the thing to blame for rising costs (Weston)?
Ivy League schools, private schools, and public schools will do about anything to make it on U. S. news and World Reports annual college rankings or other college related programs by spending more money on high-speed internet, bigger and more extravagant dining facilities, new gyms and equipment, and having apartments on campus instead of dorms (Asinof). In the 1990s the stock market and big money donors helped keep college cost reasonable, but since the economy is in a recession money is hard to come by especially for big establishments.
Student loans and financial aid help many students when it comes to paying for college, but there are some people who “make too much” to receive financial aid when in reality they need financial aid just as much as the kid coming from the single parent home with five siblings. Some argue you that there shouldn’t be an income cut off when it comes to giving someone government assistance, but if everyone who needed government assistance received it then the government would have a money problem when it comes to putting students through higher education.
Many politicians, District Education Boards and school administrators agree on the fact that declining state support for education is the main reason behind plummeting college costs (Asinof). Since the start of the economic crisis in the Untied States the tuition and mandatory fees for public four year schools in every state increased. Boston College, for example, in 2006 for an out of stator to attend it cost 33,000 dollars and now to attend for the 2010 year it costs about 39,000 dollars (College Board).
The state’s where tuition has increased the most has been Massachusetts and South Carolina where the price has jumped 26 percent (Weston). The tuition price has also been raised for community colleges as well making a two-year higher education just as expensive if you were to go to a community college out of state. The economy does play a big part in rising college costs, but so do the state the college is in as well. The state is responsible to help cover tuition costs. More needed money for health care has put a shadow over education and because of that shadow the tuitions will either stay where they are or continue to rise (Weston).
Without help paying for education the younger generation will either choose to work minimum wage jobs or will be covered with debt for half of their lives. Kelli Space, 23, graduated from Northeastern University in 2009 with a bachelor’s in sociology and also $200,000 in student loan debt (Rowley). Over the last couple of years, private lenders, nominated by college financial aid offices, have been giving young people hundreds of thousands of dollars to earn bachelor’s degrees (Rowley).
As a result of declining grants and costs, more than two-thirds of students graduated with debt in 2008 which is 45 percent more than in 1993 (Rowley). People are beginning to compare the student loan crisis that is happening to young people to the mortgage crisis that is happening to home and small business owners. Families are finding it easier to recieve a loan from private student loan firms because of how easy they make it seem to barrow money and pay for college when in reality private loan companies have strict repayment rules and have extremely high interest rates.
Tuition costs are beginning to outweigh the federal loans and grants (Rowley). Many of my friends have been saying they are trying to avoid student loans as much as possible by going to a community college first or trying to save up enough money to pay the college up front, but when it all comes down to it,in this day and age, more than one-third of college student will have to take out at least one student loan to finish their education. There has always been a cost and price on education.
The cost of working hard, the price of going out instead of studying, the cost of finding a major, and the cost of fun. Now the cost and price of paying for education is unbearable and getting to the point of being unpayable. When will the states realize education is just as important as the new pavement need on I35- south and just as important as healthcare that they will be able to lower tuition costs? Hopefully soon or this generation will have a debt epidemic that no president can promise to fix.
