Dear Future President:

Mr.President, my dad talks about paying for college and how it is really expensive. He tells me that he has been paying for his college for many years and is still paying off student loans. When my dad went to school, it was a lot cheaper than it is now. He is fearful that my sisters and I will never be able to pay off college loans. I think we should lower the cost of college.

Kids are paying thousands of dollars a year to get that higher level of education. According to the New York Times, students are paying 20 to 30 thousand dollars a year to go to school. Going to college in 2016, a class can cost $3000-$4000 dollars and students usually take four to five classes a semester. The cost of the cost of college in the 1980’s was about $7,600. This means that tuition at a 4 year college tripled in one generation. If a person goes to a private college, like University of Dayton, the tuition has increased from about $9500 in 1980 to $27,300 in 2010. If something doesn’t change to help students pay for college, it will hard for people who go to college to be debt free.

With the price that college is now, kids do not have the money to pay for it. Students just graduating high school probably do not have a lot of money; that means that kids have to take out larger loans. Then the problem is that they have to pay back the money from any loan they use. Most of the loans charge a lot of interest, which means they are paying even more money back than they borrowed. There needs to be more opportunity for scholarships, so college kids do not have to borrow as much.

Please help students today afford college, by passing a law so tuition cannot be raised so much that kids can’t afford it and have to go in debt for life. To begin with, let’s lower the cost of college tuition and allow it to be a more reasonable price. This could also lead to more kids being able to go to school and become college educated.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Sickinger