In recent years, college tuition has been on the incline, making a higher education less affordable with each passing year, in both private and public universities across the nation. According to research completed by the Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS) in 2014, about 68% of college graduates were leaving school with not only a degree, but an average of $28,950 in student loan debt. Over the course of a single decade (2004-2014), the amount of student debt had increased at more than twice the rate of inflation (The Institute for College Access and Success). These numbers beg the question: what is causing such a steep increase in college tuition, and therefore the amount of debt students are graduating with?
Concerns for student debt have generally subsided in the United States, despite the fact that it is now around $1.1 trillion dollars, simply because this is not a burden that will bring about a sudden economic crash, compared to the housing crisis and other more pressing issues. However, this number will only continue to grow, since increasing college tuitions are forcing students to take out larger loans each year. The necessity of such large loans should be scrutinized, specifically by looking into the indulgences of colleges across the country.
Sharp increases in federal student aid has allowed colleges to raise their tuition a significant amount, since lenders assume that all loans are guaranteed by the government and therefore freely dispense credit to students. Statistics have shown that, between 1973 and 2012, federal aid has increased approximately 500 percent (adjusted for inflation). To put this in perspective, if one were to look at the total federal aid granted to students in a mere decade, from 2002 to 2012, they would see that the total amount skyrocketed an inflation-adjusted 106 percent to a total of $170 million. (The Atlantic).
With this increase in federal student aid, colleges have gained an increased sense of income security, and have therefore dedication a number of resources to building lavish facilities and increasing their administrative processes. This means that less of university resources are being dedicated to educational purposes, resulting in the rising cost of tuition for students, and the subsequent increase in the amount of student loans. (The Atlantic).
Since this is a problem that faces such a large percentage of students, the press for solutions among the nation’s university population is strong. An increased interest in minimizing college costs was also spurred by President Obama’s statement that Something that has been proposed by several universities, according to Generation Progress, is a fixed-rate tuition plan. This guarantees a flat tuition rate to students when they enter the given school, ensuring that their fees will never rise above what they were when the student first entered the college. In many colleges and universities, the price of tuition is expected to rise after only the first year of attendance, and, in general, tuition rates are subject to change at any time. This is determined by a board of trustees, and establishes a certain level uncertainty when it comes to the absolute total cost of attendance for however long the student is enrolled in their chosen program.
The fixed tuition would remove that uncertainty, allowing students to more accurately calculate how much they would be spending on their education, and would eradicate any tuition hikes that may prevent said student from completing their course of study. However, it wouldn’t prevent the trustees from raising the costs of things that fall outside of what is covered by tuition, such as housing, technology fees, or on-campus meal plans. Despite this downside, the fixed rate tuition plan is certainly a positive step towards decreasing the unpredictability of college costs, as well as towards helping the student populations achieve higher education that they may have previously been denied.
Other plans that have been proposed are:
- The “pay it forward” plan: allows students to attend school for free if they agree to pay a certain percentage of their future income, scaled to the type of university that they attended
- Awarding retroactive degrees (primarily) to students that were pursuing a baccalaureate but satisfied the requirements of an associate’s degree
- Holding classes in non-profit agencies and businesses during their off-hours, therefore eliminating the college campus entirely and merging the college with the community
In short, college tuition is rapidly inflating as time passes, and, as a result, more loans are being taken out. This adds to the $1 trillion debt that is affecting the American student and college graduate population, and is becoming an increasingly pressing issue. One solution to this problem is establishing a fixed tuition in universities in order to reduce the unpredictability of college costs, but what the nation really needs is a way to reduce college tuition altogether and therefore reduce the average amount of debt students are graduating with, and therefore reducing the pressure to pay said loans back.
http://ticas.org/posd/map-state-data-2015#
http://genprogress.org/voices/2012/10/11/18132/fixedrate-tuition-a-solution-to-unpredictable-college-costs/
Three Solutions to Rising College Costs That the Far Right Finds Attractive
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/what-s-behind-america-s-soaring-college-costs/360462/