Today’s students are going to college scared of coming out with student loans they will have to pay off for years and years after they graduate. They are being told that in today’s world, one needs a college degree to get a real job and make a living for themselves. Therefore, students are being told they must go to school to then graduate with loans in order to get a job where the money will go to paying off their loans. Graduates just get to keep enough money to keep them afloat while they have the student loans over their head. College is too expensive because students are not able to enjoy their experience and focus on their studies without worrying about what comes after college and the loans that come with it. Not everyone has the opportunity to go to college because their family cannot afford it and they will never be able to pay off the loans they accumulate over their four years at a school. Many students that have loans then feel like they have to get a job in order to pay for their tuition. This job then takes away from their schoolwork and from their studies. These students are trying to obtain good grades to get a degree, but have to sacrifice study time so they can work to pay off loans and pay for tuition. Many students also have scholarships which require one to maintain a certain grade point average. If a job is taking away from their studies and schoolwork, then it can cause them to lose their scholarship. As a result, they will have to take out more loans or drop out of college because they simply cannot afford it. College is such a major stepping stone for a lot of young adults that are trying to do a lot of things with their lives. College is supposed to be an important thing for a lot of people and it is supposed to be a big factor in helping young adults figure out what they want to do with their lives. Why make something that is supposed to be so important to the future adults and workers of the American population so hard to achieve and so much to pay for? College is supposed to be another form of education and the fact that we have to pay for another level of learning is already a little bit absurd but to ask for such a high price to pay for the tuition is not needed. This high price of college is unprecedented and causes students to have to get out loans and be in debt, causes people to try to come up with the amount to pay for it if they don’t want to pull out debts, and it is actually a whole lot harder to start a payment system to start paying back the un paid for college you took loans for.

The price of college tuition has recently been a big problem for students and a big deciding factor for a lot of students on whether or not that they can go to college. According to an article from the New York Times called “Is College Tuition Really Too High?” which states that since the year 1974 the price of college tuition has quadrupled in prices. A prime example of this was back in 1970 the price to attend Harvard was only $200 then for the first time since 1949 the school raised its price, it was raised to $2,600. Now over 40 years after those prices were set the annual tuition will set you back $45,278 and that’s not even including room and board. For retrospect that price of tuition is more than 17 times the cost of 1971. Some will say that this is due to the rising inflation, but according to the Consumer Price Index if tuition rates would have followed the actual followed the inflation rate then next year’s tuition would be at $15,189. This does not just apply to the top of the top universities like Harvard or Yale but to all types of colleges. At private, nonprofit, four-year universities the average cost of tuition in 2014 was $31,231 which was a large increase from the $1,832 in 1971-1972. At public, four-year schools, the cost of tuition in 2014 was $9,139 which was over 18 times more than in was in 1971 when it cost less than $500 a year. A professor of education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Ray Franke said the “If you look at the long-term trend, college tuition has been rising almost six percent above the rate of inflation.” Studies that followed this path of the rising cost of the different types of colleges shows that the projected tuition cost for a semester in 2029 for a 4-year out of state public college will end up being around $71,373, a 4 year private, non-profit, will be around $92,869, and that a 4 year public in state will cost around $41,228. This shows that the prices of college have been rising far faster than they should be rising and that it is supposed to be far less cheap than it is. The reason for this is because every year they have to raise the price of college tuition to cover the debt from the years that were not able to pay the years before which gets it stuck into a supposed infinite loop of raised college tuition prices. 

One of the biggest concerns for students is the amount of money that they have to come up with to cover the outrageous price of tuition. One of the most common ways that students have to use to help pay for their tuition is federal or privatized student loans. Privatized student loans are on the rise as of recent years, in the 2012-2013 school year $6.4 billion was borrowed which was up from $5.5 billion borrowed in 2011-2012. These student loans seem like a smart idea at the time but with added interest, that ranges from two to fifteen percent, throughout the years the actual price of these student loans are often multiplied by way more than what they started out to be. The average student loan debt for a graduating student is around $28,000 and most of the time that is before it starts to build up interest. The system used to pay back the debts is flawed too, it makes you pay monthly payments to pay back the debt which can become something that is hare to handle when you have to pay for other things as well, such as a car, house, groceries, and a child. The average amount that is required to meet the monthly payment in the US is $351 which can be hard for certain people to pay for depending on what job they have. Based on a statistic took of the graduating class in 2012 from four year colleges, said that seventy-one percent of the graduating class had at least some kind of student debt, but it goes for all schools too. There was 66% of graduates from public colleges that had loans and 75% of graduates from private colleges has loans. This is only a constant add on to the national student debt that is at $1.31 trillion dollars as of 2016. Whereas they do have Public Service Loan Forgiveness to help either eliminate or lessen the amount of debt someone has to pay back, it only has serviced 494,200 borrows out of the 44.2 million Americans that have gotten a student loan. Another argument that could be raised against this is that the government already gives students financial help to get them through some of their school payments in financial aid, but it isn’t anywhere near enough. The average federal aid given out per student annually is around $8,070 compared to the $25,000 students have to pay annually which still leaves around $17,000 that they still have to find a way to pay back to the university for their tuition. All of these things have a lasting effect on students that plan to attend college because when they do their research on how they plan to pay for their education, they see the truth behind how much college really is. The worst part about the need for student loans to pay for the ever growing tuition prices is that these student’s loans more often than not don’t effect the student’s education at the time but it effects it later on in life when they try to have a real life and lose a lot of money monthly that could be used for better or more important things. This also gives the student a false view of the actual monetary amount that they are paying to this college because a lot of people don’t know how a loan actually works so they think that they are only paying the amount on the billing statement when in reality what was done was that that student was locked into a binding contract for a long number of years. 

There are arguments against the claim that college is too expensive saying that the amount of money that you will make after you are graduated from a four year college than you would have to pay during your time at the university and that you would make more money than you would have if you just had a high school diploma. Where it is true that you will make more money that you will make more money than someone that just has a high school diploma but the argument that you will make more money than you pull out in student loans because there are so many different outcomes that happen. The first thing is that you aren’t certain to get a job right out of college or anytime soon after you get out of college. A statistic done by employer.aftercollege.com says that 83% of students that graduated in 2015 had no job lined up for after their graduation even though 72.7% said that they were looking for a job. This leads to a higher unemployment rate and that means that you aren’t able to start paying back your loans. Another argument to rebuttal against that is that just because you have a college degree does not mean that you will get a job that requires a college degree or a better job than someone that didn’t go to college. Another argument is that the job market is getting tougher and that since sometimes you can not get a job so you can not say that you can make more money if the degree has no use because you can not get a job. 

There are different ways to fix this issue about the rising cost of tuition before it gets too out of hand. The main thing that is causing issues is that the people trying to fight this issue are not looking for real answers to the issue, they say that the best way to fix this is to just get free college. The issue with this is that leads to no foreseeable way for the schools to make enough money to cover all the things they cover for now. This leads to the dismissal of the issue and right on to the next one. I have several ideas on what the country can do to stem the rising cost of tuition. The first one being that there is a major issue with the government subsidies that are currently given out. These subsidies don’t rely any way on education and is just handed out to schools based on size. This leads to some schools getting a lot of money and wasting it on things like overpaying professors, hiring unnecessary administration, or into athletics while also having a high dropout rate. If they were to link subsidies to things like graduation rate then the money would go to schools that would throw that back into education and not need as much money from students. The second one is grants given to states. If they are to give more grants to every state then that in turn means more financial aid for the residents of that state and then less the students have to pay for college.  Both of these ideas are not too farfetched and they can be achieved with not that much detriment to anything 

College is not just another form of education that is not a necessity. College should be able to be attended by anyone that wants to take the time to further their education and further their careers more than just a high school diploma can do. College should not have a price on it because it leads to the lessened desire from young adults to want to go ahead and get a higher education and try to get a better job and salary. This increase in prices throughout the years cause an increased debt to add on to the debt calendar and leads to having to increase the price of tuition for the next year to try to pay off the lost money from the loans that was taken out the year before. This leads to more problems than it does lead to solutions, following down this path will lead to a time in the not so far future that will lead to a time when only the richest of the richest will be able to get a college education and the poor and middle class will not be able to afford to go get a higher education and this will lead to an economic instability and a social instability in the United States. Also the fact that the price of tuition isn’t growing at the expected rate that is was supposed to be at this point in time but it is actually moving faster and this is leading to an unknown assumption of when another big jump in college prices are going to jump up. A lot of the struggle that is faced by current and future students is how they are going to find the means necessary to be able to cover the hefty costs of college tuition and also whatever else they are going to need. While you also have to pay an absurd amount to cover all the costs of school, classes, board and so much more but also some students have to cover stuff like rent for living off campus and food and any other resources they would need to help them while they were in college. With all of these things on top of each other it makes school so much harder to pay for, especially since when getting a financial aid or student loan does not cover the extra resources that you need to get while at the university. Another problem with having to pay so much for this education is that you are technically paying for uncertainty, just because you paid for all that school work you did and walked across that stage to grab your diploma does not mean that you are guaranteed a job in your field or even a job at all. To have to pay so much money and go through the process of getting a loan and working so hard for so much money to not even to be made sure you will get employed is a big turn off for a lot of people on the idea of college when they can just go ahead and save money by not going to college and just going straight to work. With all of these increasing prices and reasons of uncertainty the price of college tuition should be lowered or college should become a free way to get a further education. I understand that some facilities and staff members need that money to get paid but at some schools it is not even a necessity because the amount of money the athletic program brings in at those schools more than helps pay for the amount of money that needs to go to faculties and staff members. The price of college is too high for the common middle class family to be able to send their children to school confidentially without doing something such as taking a loan out or having to get stuff such as a second mortgage to help pay their kids way to college. The price of college needs to head in a different direction than it is now because it is heading to a danger path that is going to make college for the future young adults seem more like a dream than a reality. 
