Dear Next President:

Here in the twenty-first century, everyone wants to go to college, but not everyone has the power to. Some people come from families who are farmers, or families who work extra hours just to be able to support their kids, but how are those families supposed to get the money to attend college if they barely make enough to support their kid? America most definitely needs lower college tuition, and I truly hope that you can fix that.

Going to an average college like a public college is around $9,410 (Source 8), which isn’t that high, but if you were ever planning on going to a good, dream college like Yale or Harvard it costs 60,000 dollars annually (Source 2 and 3). For those of us who decide to get a side job after school to save up for this, we would have to work at most likely a minimum wage place, like McDonald's or Burger King, and making that much money annually from a place like that would take 8276 hours annually to afford going to our dream college, which is around 344 days straight annually which is a physical impossibility. Now I get that Hillary Clinton is planning on making college tuition free for people who make under 125k annually "I want to make college debt-free and for families making less than a hundred twenty five thousand dollars, you will not get a tuition bill from a public college or a university if the plan that I worked on with Bernie Sanders is enacted." (Source 3) but I think that is wildly absurd. Making College Tuition free is extremely vacuous, and I think a large amount of people would agree.

So many families and students save up and put in so much effort into attending college, but an astounding amount of people cannot attend due to financial issues. Many families are not rich and cannot give their child the money they need for dream colleges like Harvard, which is as I previously said is 60,000 dollar tuition annually. Some families actually can’t even afford the cost of public college at 9,410 annually, and the longer people wait, the worse it gets since we higher tuition prices to pay off debt, giving them even more to worry about. As for the students who are looking for a scholarship, those are extremely difficult to get, and the most difficult, but the one that could save your wallet, is a full ride. Less than 20,000 students get full rides annually (Source 4), and as many as that sounds, it honestly isn’t that many, and as I said before, they are an extremely difficult thing to obtain, but some people deserve it and to some people it is a necessity. For example, some people did extremely poorly in school up until a point where they were determined to succeed and were inspired, but colleges judge you by every grade in every grade level, not by determination, so they cannot get the scholarship they need to attend and afford college tuition. I personally, think that those people deserve a second chance to prove themselves, and to succeed, not to be thrown away like the garbage for their past mistakes. I truly hope you can fix these issues that we are struggling with.

Making college tuition free would also not help with anything. If we made tuition free, we would need more colleges, there would be too many people who are looking for jobs, and you wouldn’t have the satisfaction of going to it. I personally am planning on going to medical school, and sure I want tuition lowered, but if they make it free, there may be no job spot for once I finish, and I would hate to have to travel around the world looking for a place to work at. If college tuition became free, it wouldn’t be a privilege anymore, it would be like high school, and eventually it would most likely become mandatory, and if it does, what about the people that don’t want to go to college? What about fast food workers? Some things shouldn’t dive too deep into the water, and this is most definitely one of them.

I truly hope you will take my thoughts on college tuition into consideration and will not make it free, but will lower it. Do you want a world of unhappiness, or a world where people can enjoy their career, debt free.

Sincerely, Logan 

Sources:

 Source 1: www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/harvard-glance

Source 2: http://college-tuition.startclass.com/l/751/Yale-University

Source 3: http://www.businessinsider.com/hillary-clinton-free-college-tuition-plan-will-add-to-national-debt-2016-10

Source 4: www.cbsnews.com/news/how-rare-are-full-ride-scho