Is College Tuition Really Too High?

The Problem with Higher Education

Higher education in this country is a confounding feature of our society. In order to do well and have a successful career, some people need to take out a high amount of debt to graduate. Attending college is seen as the key to success in our economy, yet there is also a percentage of high school students that do not even consider attending college. Some students, specifically high-income students, view college as an after-thought, a place that they will attend no matter what happens in their life. They have the means to attend college and know that attending college is the way that they can replicate the success of their parents. For low-income students, college can be seen as a daunting place where only

Politicians are correct when they say that college tuition has been rising much faster than the rate of inflation. In his article entitled, “Is College Tuition Really Too High?” Adam Davidson, who now writes for the New Yorker, says that accounting for inflation, “Tuition at a private university is now roughly three times as expensive as it was in 1974…public tuition, at $9,000 has risen by nearly four times” (Davidson). This exponential growth of college tuition has led to the astronomical sticker prices seen at many universities. The sticker price of many universities can be a shock to many students who are exploring colleges while in high school, but this shock is most likely the most severe for low-income students. For most students, the sticker price shown for college tuition is not the price the student will end up paying due to aid they will receive. However, due to the inability of states to increase the per-student federal funding for higher education, this aid goes to higher-income students at a disproportionate rate. Elite schools such as Harvard and Yale, as well as premier public schools like the University of Minnesota or Michigan all use their aid to attract the best students. (Davidson) This is a problem as the students these schools are attracting are high-achieving students from educated families. Regardless of

To many people, this fact may seem very evident, but a study completed by Rachel Dwyer, Laura McCloud and Randy Hodson, three professors specializing in economic topics, provides a clearer example of this. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, the study looks to find the level at which debt becomes too much of a burden for the student, causing adverse effects on their graduation. When the study separated the results of the study show that the effects of debt on graduation are almost wholly confined to students at public colleges. Students at public universities have an inflection point, the breakeven point at which debt no longer has positive effects on graduation, “earlier in the debt accumulation process at $10,557” (Dwyer 1145). Students attending private colleges have little negative results on the graduation as a result of student debt. As a result of these results, the study then focuses just on students at public colleges, to take a deeper look at the breakdown of student debt effects on different socio-economic classes. When breaking apart the classes, low-income students have an inflection point of $9,882, when student loans begin to undercut the rats of graduation. Students from a more advantaged background in public universities experience the same curvature on their rates of graduation, but their inflection point is higher at