For many people in the United States, the first eighteen years of one’s life consist of passing through grade school, graduating from high school, and capping off your education by attending an institution of higher education. To many, attending college upon high school graduation is seen almost as a rite of passage into adulthood. You spend four years studying and gaining the knowledge necessary to pursue a career in a field that interests you, all the while experiencing what it is like to live on your own for (in most cases) the first time in your life. First year college students are forced to adapt to their new environment, free of parental guidance and protection, albeit within the safety net of a university dormitory. Most would agree that the experience one gains by going off to college for the first time is a positive and beneficial one, but the biggest issue many people have with college, especially in today’s day and age, is the price tag that comes with it. 

In recent decades, the price of attending an institution of higher education has risen astronomically. College tuition has gone from a debt one could pay off by working a part-time job between semesters, to one that an individual must to take on extremely burdensome loans in order to finance. These are loans that in many cases, can take a great portion of an individual’s professional working life to pay back. The trend of increased tuition fees for public universities in the United States has occurred mainly due to budget cuts from state and local governments, as well as an increased focus on student services, and while finding one end-all be-all solution to this problem may not be feasible or even possible, an option that should be taken into serious consideration as a strong step in the right direction is the implementation of mandated fixed-rate tuition plans at all public universities. 

While attending a public university in the United States is today one of the more costly investments that a young adult can make, this has not always been the case. According to figures from College Board, for the 1976-77 school year, the average cost to attend a four-year, in-state public university was $2,600. Now, for the 2016-17 school year, that number sits at $9,650, a 271% increase (Trends in Higher Education). In comparison, the average yearly income per household in the United States increased by just 16% over the same time period, from $48,011 in 1976 to $55,775 in 2016 (Manuel). This discrepancy shows that the increases in tuition fees over the years can not simply be attributed to inflation, as the cost of tuition has increased at a far greater rate than the U.S. average income per household. If inflation alone can not be blamed for tuition increases, then what can?

The earliest beginnings of tuition spikes can be traced back to just after the ending of World War II, when millions of American soldiers were returning from the war to rejoin American society. Prior to the war, attending an institution of higher education and earning a college degree was a privilege and luxury that only the wealthiest of families could afford for their children. This all changed upon the conclusion of the war with the introduction of the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known today as the GI Bill (Sanchez). According to OurDocuments.gov, “this act provided tuition, subsistence, books and supplies, equipment, and counseling services for veterans to continue their education in school or college” (Our Documents). This act was designed to help combat postwar depression among returning soldiers by providing them with free access to higher education. This new program, along with a multitude of other factors in society, was part of what caused a rapid growth in popularity in attending college in the 1950’s and 60’s. With this rapid growth in the popularity of higher education among young Americans, however, came the Federal Perkins Loan program (Sanchez). This government loan program “did for civilians what the GI Bill had done for veterans,” and made institutions of higher education widely available to a vast range of young American adults by providing those who would otherwise be unable to afford college with the funds they require, set to be paid back over the course of their post-graduate careers (U.S. Department of Education).

Up until the early 1970’s, public higher education had remained at its’ cheapest and most accessible as it ever has been, but this changed due to a decline of the economy in the 1970’s. Family income began to decline across the country, and public investment in higher education declines with in. With public investment falling, the government had less money to devote to higher education, which not only made government loans harder to obtain for any average student (and in turn led to more families beginning to rely more on private loans than money borrowed from the government), but also caused the first instances of tuition increases (Sanchez). 

Although the 1970’s saw the first notable instances of tuition increases at public institutions due to lack of government funding, it was the economic recession of 2007 that had a direct impact on some of the most significant tuition increases to have hit American universities. After the collapse of the global economy, state governments were forced to make heart budget cuts, and one of the sectors that suffered the most was that of higher education spending. Since 2008, states are spending a nationwide average of 28%, or $2,353 per student less on higher   education, while eleven states but their spending by more than one-third per student, and Arizona and New Hampshire each cut their spending by more than one-half per student (Oliff, Palacios, Johnson and Leachman). 

With these deep cuts in state funding, public universities have been forced to find new ways to fund the education of their students, and many universities have turned to tuition increases. Since 2008 alone, tuition at public universities has risen by 27% as a national average, although this figure varies greatly, with states such as California and Arizona raising tuition by over 70% (Oliff, Palacios, Johnson and Leachman).

Another trend, along with decreasing budgetary support from state and local governments, that is partially responsible for the rises in tuition fees is the idea that university administrators as well as students are beginning to see college not only as a place to educate themselves and conduct research, but also “as a country club”. “In the past decade, spending on student services, which includes everything from mental health services to career counseling to staffing student recreations centers with climbing walls and lazy rivers, grew by more than 20% at private colleges and the top public universities” (Selingo). In order to compete for the highest-achieving incoming freshmen, universities have had to increase their spending in certain extracurricular areas, such as the climbing walls and lazy rivers mentioned above.

Just how much are public universities spending then, you might ask? According to CNBC’s John W. Schoen, in 2011, of the average of $37,000 spent per student, only $16,000, or 43% of those funds were spent either on research or instruction. As for the other $21,000 spent per student that year, these funds were spent on areas including institutional support, academic support, operations and maintenance, public service, student services/amenities, and scholarships (Schoen). By 2011, the average public university was allocating approximately 20% of its funds towards student services and amenities (Schoen).

Given the scale of the tuition increases that students have watched go into play, especially in the past decade, it would be nearly impossible to come up with one solution that could fix this problem instantly and make college more widely affordable again. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the tuition crisis won’t be fixed in one either. That being said, the fact that public higher education is becoming less and less affordable as the years go by is still a crisis that needs to be solved somehow, and in order to solve any problem, you have to start somewhere. In the case of tuition costs at public institutions of higher education in the United States, that somewhere is the mandated implementation of guaranteed- or fixed-rate tuition plans at all public universities in the United States.

To be very specific, the plan I propose involves the passing of a law that requires that every public, state-funded institution of higher education in the United States makes available to its’ students the option to enroll in a fixed-rate tuition plan. In addition, upon a students’ successful completion of the undergraduate degree within five years, that student will receive a monetary rebate after graduating.

Fixed-rate tuition, as defined by the University of Houston (an institution in the state of Texas, one state that has already mandated that these tuition plans be made an option to students enrolled in their public universities), is “a budgeting tool to help students and parents accurately prepare their educational budget by establishing the same tuition rate for four years and eliminating uncertainty about future tuition increases.” In short, fixed-rate tuition is exactly what it sounds like: students are guaranteed one set tuition rate that they will pay each year throughout their four years of undergraduate study. This is beneficial to students entering college not only because it allows for much more ease when it comes to planning how much of a financial burden their education will be, but also because it incentivizes a student to finish their undergraduate schooling within four or five years.

One of the leading factors that drives college students to either drop out indefinitely or not finish their schooling is the uncertainty of what the final, total cost of their education will be due to year-to-year tuition increases. While universities will publish on their websites what they charge in tuition, this figural rarely stands for an individual’s entire undergraduate career, thus making it very difficult for incoming college freshmen to budget and plan out how they will finance their higher education. The ideal counter to this, then, is indeed the option of fixed-rate tuition plans. “I did a lot of planning to go ahead and try to stay out of debt and to make sure that I could cover school, and I could come to the school that I wanted to go to. I think having that fixed-rate tuition was a huge part of that.” says Alyssa Johnson, who was a student at Columbia College in Columbia, Missouri (qtd. in Johnson).

Another benefit of having a fixed-rate tuition plan is the fact that these plans incentivize and motivate students to finish their undergraduate degrees in four or five years. With many institutions’ fixed-rate tuition plans, a clause is included that only guarantees the student their first-year tuition rate through a certain period of time. In most cases, students are eligible to receive their first-year tuition rates for only their first four years of undergraduate study, although some institutions allow students five years to complete their degree while still paying their fixed-rate tuition.

On top of having the incentive of a student finishing their undergraduate studies within four or five years to avoid paying increased tuition rates, some schools incentivize finishing your undergraduate studies within four or five years even further, by offering rebates upon graduation to those students who do in fact graduate with their bachelor’s degree within the time allotted by the institution. In Texas, one of the sates which requires its’ public universities to make fixed-rate tuition plans available to their incoming students, there are a few universities who utilize incentives in the form of rebates (Hamilton). The University of Texas at Austin offers a rebate of $2,500 upon graduation if a student is enrolled in their “Longhorn Fixed Tuition” program (University of Texas’ version of a fixed-rate tuition plan) and finishes their degree with no more than three more additional credit hours attempted than the minimum number of credits required for their degree, and finishes graduates four or five years, dependent on their degree program (University of Texas at Austin).

While fixed-rate tuition plans are certainly an excellent way for students and their families to be more informed about precisely how much their higher education will cost them in the long run, many argue that despite eliminating the unpredictable tuition increases, these plans could still end up costing students just as much, if not more, by the time they finish their schooling. The logic behind this idea is that when administrators decide on what the actual rate of their fixed-rate tuition plans will be, they take an extremely liberal estimate of what the average tuition rate would be for four years of the typical, annually increasing rates that students who do not enroll in the fixed-rate programs would be subject to. Because universities are forced to forecast what tuition rates will be up to four years in the future, this “encourages institutions to set tuition higher than they would annual adjustments.”  (Delaney, Kearney and Hemenway, 62). It makes sense that universities would want to front-load the tuition rates to account for inflation and the tuition increases that would occur naturally, but the plan for mandated fixed-rate tuition programs that I propose includes the rebates, similar to the ones utilized by institutions in the state of Texas, as a key component to balance out the front-loaded flat-rate plans.

While universities in Texas use a set figure as the rebate that students will receive upon graduating with their bachelor’s degree within a set number of years, the total amount of the rebates given to students upon graduation under my plan would be more calculated. The purpose of giving students the option to enroll in a fixed-rate tuition plan is to give them a benefit or an advantage over paying tuition in the traditional way, and being subjected to annual increases throughout their undergraduate studies. To achieve this, the total amount of tuition a student would have paid, had they not been enrolled in a fixed-rate plan (that is, first year tuition, plus the increased second year tuition, and so on) would be subtracted from the total amount that they ended up paying over the four years of the undergraduate studies under the fixed-rate plan. In short, the amount of the rebate the student would receive upon graduation would be equal to the difference between the total tuition paid under the fixed-rate plan and the total tuition that would have been paid without the fixed-rate plan.

As previously stated, the issue of outlandish tuition fees facing our nation and our college-bound young adults is a massive one and quite difficult to approach in terms of finding a solution. What my plan of mandated fixed-rate tuition plans at all public universities is, is not that solution. What it is, however, is a place to start. Tuition rates at universities in the United States are still increasing currently, and the first step to fixing this problem is to slow down or stop the increases, and this would be accomplished with the implementation of fixed-rate tuition programs. If universities are required to provide students with a tuition rate that is guaranteed to remain the same throughout their undergraduate studies, provided they finish their degrees on time, and also to pay students who do successfully graduate on time the rebates that make up any differences in total tuition between what they paid under their fixed-rate plan and what they would have paid without the plan, tuition increases will slow as institutions will begin to have less reason to annually increase tuition rates. The trend of increased tuition fees at public universities in the United States has occurred mainly due to budget cuts from state and local governments, as well as an increased focus on student services and amenities, and while finding one end-all be-all solution to this problem may not be feasible or even possible, an option that, if taken into serious consideration, would be a strong step in the right direction is the implementation of mandated fixed-rate tuition plans at all public universities in the United States.
