Future President

1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. or Mrs. Future President,

If there were a chance to better your future you'd take it. But if you saw that the opportunity causes many problems, you'd be discouraged and afraid to take it. College is expensive, making many students take out loans, which put them in tremendous debt. I am a highschool student that plans on going to college but am unsure of how I'll pay. The high cost of college discourages many students with financial concerns from getting a better education and also can ruin the chances that it's trying to give to students so something to cheapen costs should be done.

Bright kids that aren't so rich aren't all going to college because of the means they would need to go by to pay for it. When you look at college, it's becoming more normal for people to take it than it used to be. If you compare it to high school and think about how you'd feel about someone who wasn't going to it. It's weird, but there are some doing that. But for the vast majority of those kids it's because of their situation. And it's the same with college, some of the kids not attending don't want to go, but many can't. 66% of students with parents that have financial concerns went to college, apposed to 90% of students with parents that don't have financial concerns went. I think that those statistics are insane. If you put those two together, 27% of students didn't go to college, and 22% had financial concerns. If that's 20 million students, which probably isn't as many students that would be included in this study, that's roughly 4.4 million students discouraged by price, showing that ultimately, being born into a rich family pays off for your future. If these kids don't go to college, they won't have as many opportunities to provide for a possible future family and having the same happening to their children.

College is supposed to help you get a nice, well paying job in the future. But, if it puts you in debt, then you're just going through life for a while just trying to make that debt disappear. A plan to cheapen college, not make it free, would be reasonable to a pretty good extent. Obama proposed a plan to make the first two years of community college free. It's a good step towards progress but I think that making community college entirely free makes it harder to push for cheaper public college. I think that it's wonderful that people are trying to make the situation easier and less difficult to deal with. But my solution would just be to lower costs for community and public college slightly, so people don't worry too much about large spikes in taxes. Obama had a really good idea if this were an ideal world, but unfortunately, it isn't, and people will be selfish.

People will look at it and say something along the lines of, “college is a privilege, so why would we have to pay for other people's cheaper tuitions?” And, it's a fairly valid point. But I don't think college is much of a privilege anymore. The majority of kids are going to college, and it's not much of a privilege if everyone goes. Also, if college gets cheapened and taxes raise, most likely it's not gonna harm you too much considering it'd be based on income. College has been rising in price along with the cheapening of the dollar, but tuition has been rising about six percent above the rate inflation. If we want at least something close to a level playing field, find some way to slow the rate of increasing cost so it at least rises with inflation.

College tuition is much more than people think they can handle, it makes their future that much harder, and the prices have been rising too fast. I believe that a way to make it somewhat easier is to lower cost of all tuitions, except Ivy League colleges, by one percent. This changes average tuition for private institutions under $2,000 cheaper. But at a point, there will be decisions made that will make many people very unhappy, but that's sort of the way that life goes.

Sincerely,