Dear Future President,

I am currently a senior in high school, and will apply to college this month. I plan to major in business, and I would like to attend college somewhere in New England. Like most people attending college, I plan to leave with a degree and a large amount of debt.

This widespread accumulation of student debt can’t be good for the economy. Instead of spending money and thus stimulating the private sector, young people in the workforce will be holding onto their money and trying to pay off loans. If you look at a graph of both median income and college tuition over time, you’ll notice that median income has hardly risen, while the cost of college has shot up exponentially. When weighing the option of whether college is worth the cost, you can simply ask, will the money I make with a degree outweigh the cost of that degree? If this trend of increasing college tuition is to stay, the question of whether college is worth it will more and more be answered with a “no”.

The good thing is that this is finally becoming an issue that we are beginning to see politicians speak about. This year, a proposal for tuition-free college was brought up by a democratic nominee. Another had a plan to make college debt-free. Some think that these plans are farfetched, but this issue is important enough that realistic solutions must be presented. With an increasingly global economy, it is essential that the United States keeps up, and higher education being too expensive will not help our cause. How will you solve the problem of the cost of college?

Sincerely,

Tom Szewczyk