Dear next President,

I think that the cost of college tuition should be lowered so that all families can have a chance to send their kids to college. As a student in high school I will be going to college soon and my family and I are worried about how much college is going to cost.

There are many issues with the cost of college tuition in the article “Student Dropout Rates Linked To High Stress Over Finances” the author eLearners, writer for salary.com, claims “only one in five students who enroll in an associate's degree program graduate in three years, and two in five who enroll in a four-year plan graduate in six years.” College is getting too expensive for students to pay so their only option is to dropout. It took my mom 10 years to graduate from college with an associate's degree which is ridiculous considering she had financial aid and she went to a public 2 year college. On the website “trends.collegeboard.org” there is a chart that shows the price of college over the past few years and according to the information in the chart it says that public four year college tuition on average was about $4,000 in 2000-01 and now its about $9,400. College tuition has gone up about $5,400 in 16 years. College is getting more and more expensive and students are being put further and further in debt with no way to pay it off. In her article “College Costs Must Be Lowered” Lina Barkawi states that on average a graduate walked away with $24,000 in student loans and that 1 in 5 graduates are unemployed. Lina says, “Students are leaving school with huge debt and no way to pay it off”. In this day and age there is no way to survive without going to college because more and more jobs are requiring that you have a college degree. In the article “Is College Education Worth It?” ProCon.org has provided a list of the pros and cons of going to college. A pro they have on the list is that more and more jobs require a college degrees and they report that in 2018 63% of jobs will require a college degree or at least some college education. The same article also provides a pro that suggests college graduates are more likely to have health insurance and a retirement plan. ProCon.org claims “ 70% of college graduates had access to employer-provided health insurance compared to 50% of high school graduates in 2008.” That is a big difference and health insurance is important to have just in case anything happens. If you get in an accident or something and you don’t have health insurance what are you going to do or if you die are you just going to put that burden on your family, they’d have to pay for everything. My step-dad has recently died and when he did we wouldn’t have been able to afford to cremate him if we didn’t get anything from his health insurance.

A lot of people argue against lowering college tuition such as Robert Bergeneau who argues in his article titled “Free College Tuition Would Only Increase Inequality” that free college would increase inequality, but if everyone has the ability to go to college and get a college degree the income gap should get smaller since people would have higher paying jobs. Matt Krupnick another writer suggests that lower college tuition would lead to higher bills in his article “Why College Tuition Cuts Can Actually Lead To Higher Bills” I understand where he is coming from but I have to say that if more people have a college degree and are making more money it won’t really matter if bills are higher because people will actually be able to afford those bills. Bob Luebke says that most students who go to college don’t even end up getting good jobs and it’s pointless to even get a college degree. First it is not pointless to get a college degree because college is what is preparing you for the job, I get that some jobs don’t require a college degree and that’s great but they usually aren’t high paying jobs and you might even get stuck with a job you hate. Second of all if you can go to college and train for something that you would love to do and make good money off of then why wouldn’t you go for it. Why would you listen to this downer and let him destroy your dreams? If you want something work for it and make it happen.

Recently Obama has made a plan to make college more affordable so that every american family can send their kids to college if they wish. I am glad Obama has made this plan because otherwise college tuition would continue to rise and eventually become too expensive for anyone, including me, the rich would be the only people fortunate enough to attend college. The problem with lowering the cost of tuition is that colleges can’t do it without harming themselves because the government won’t help colleges pay for their bills and the tuition is their main source of income. A way the government could help lower the cost of tuition is to spend less on the military, and to tax more of the rich and put it towards the colleges to help them pay for their bills.

Sincerely,

Andraya R, Grade 10, Saint Paul, MN