Dear Future President,

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 43.3 million Americans are living with student loan debt today. Through personal experience, I have noticed that mass amounts of high school students stress over the thought of getting into college, but more importantly thinking about how they will pay for college. If this high rate were to keep up, more and more college students will have to spend a big portion of their life living in debt. With the large numbers in schools the United States offers, students should not have to base what college they can and can not attend due to the cost, but more so their grades. Unfortunately, if there is not a change made soon, the desire for kids to want to further their education may slowly decrease.

Take this into perspective: in 1971-72, to attend a 4-year college in state the yearly tuition fees were approximately 1,405 dollars. Currently, the yearly cost of going to an in-state 4 year college has nearly gone up in price by 18,143 dollars, making today’s price 19,548 dollars, which is what the 2016 college board discovered. Due to these insane prices, students are left to work 24/7 in high school, which needs to be limited. The CNN studies show that students today are left with three times as much homework than the National Education Association suggests. With this in mind, then how are students also expected to work to pay for living, tuition, food, and living necessities? From these studies, they found that this does not only create stress, but it can cause health issues. Simply, if the tuition was not as much, students would not have to work as much, leaving them with more time to focus on their studies.

After further looking into this issue, I came across an article by the US News, which declared that it takes the average bachelor degree student an immense amount of time to pay off their college loans, roughly 21 years. By this time, the average person is living in their own house with their family, paying their car payment, taxes, and all their house bills, etc. Clearly, nobody wants to be moving on with their lives while still paying off college debt. The amount of students who I have talked to constantly worry about the cost of college and I strongly believe that slowly, there can be a change made.

I hope you please take this letter into consideration. If students are able to further their education without having to base it all on costs, life for students would be much simpler and a big weight would be lifted off their shoulders, including mine. If America came to a big agreement, we can all petition to make the price of college tuition reasonable, and you will be able to see that this is a largely requested issue that needs to be addressed.

Thank you for taking your time to read this.

Sincerely,

Halle W.