Dear Future President,

Many very bright and talented students are unable to attend or finish college due to not having enough money to pay for all of the expenses, such as housing, food, tuition, and textbooks. According to collegedata.com, “the average cost of in state tuition for the 2015-2016 school year was $24,061, and private institutions averaged around $47,831. This can be more or less based on what you are majoring in”. It can also be a lot more if you go to college out of state.. Colleges for engineering costed about $2,200 extra a year. If you’re going to college out of your home state, tuition can nearly double!

Saying tuition free college can be misleading. This so called “free college” will only cover people on the lesser side of cash earning in the United States. Plus, it will only cover public and community colleges. The plans of Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton is to cover the children of parents with a yearly income under $85,000. Another part of this plan is to increase that by $10,000 every year, to end at covering families that make under $125,000 a year.

College hasn’t always costed so much money. In 1980, public college tuition was $2,100, and $9,500 for private colleges (information from thinkprogress.org, research done by Demos). According to Gordon Wadsworth, author of The College Trap, “…if the cost of college tuition was $10,000 in 1986, it would now cost the same student over $21,500 if education had increased as much as the average inflation rate. Instead, education is $59,800, or over 2 ½ times the inflation rate.” (Quote from Forbes). America has grown since 1980, and the cost of college has grown with it.

The main issue with this is that nothing is bright students being unable to attend college due to their families not having enough money to put them through college. Yes, students can get scholarships to college for money off, even a full ride. According to author Mark Kantrowitz, who is the publisher of FastWeb and FinAid, “less than 20,000 students a year receive a completely free ride to college. Among full-time college students enrolled at four-year colleges, just .3% received enough grants and scholarships to cover the full cost of college. The odds of receiving a full-ride private scholarship is even more remote.” According to Kantrowitz, there are less than 250 private scholarships in this country that provide enough money to cover all college costs.

There are good things and bad things in every solution. The negatives of this is primarily taxes. Information from an interview with Bernie Sanders on March 30th, 2016, states that “Sanders estimates that his plan to make undergraduate tuition at public colleges and universities free would cost about $75 billion annually. Based on his proposed College for All Act, the federal government would fund two-thirds of that cost using a tax on Wall Street trading, but participating states would have to kick in the remaining costs.” (from politifacts.com). The bad part about that is the state taxes. States may choose not to opt in, which could create a lack of funding and an ultimate failure of the plan to make colleges tuition free.

In conclusion, I hope that you could help many people who don’t have the same chances that you have, who can never in their lifetime become president, who can’t have an education like yours, who don’t get paid nearly enough, and who can’t afford to get an excellent college education. I believe if you and a few other people could get the government to help fund the poor families that can’t send their kids to college. All it takes is a few words to change millions of lives.

Sincerely,

Nolan F.