How Much is too Much for College?
Looking at how the rise in college tuition costs has hurt the average family.
Dear Mr. or Mrs. President,
In 2012, 71 percent of students graduating from four-year colleges had student loan debt. That percentage is only rising. There must be some way that you can lower college tuition or possibly make college free. As a junior in high school paying for college is something I am very concerned about. I have two older brothers who have both attended college, and both of them are still in debt. Neither one of them could find a good enough paying job that pertained to their major, so both are working jobs that don’t even deal with their major. One of my brothers even says, “Just take the money you would spend on college and go ahead to work.” He thinks I would be better off to just find a job, because you might not end up working in the same field you went to college for.
A new survey from CareerBuilder suggests that plenty of Americans never work in the field that they prepared for in college. Among the 2,134 workers surveyed, 47 percent of college graduates did not find a first job that was related to their college major. What's more, 32 percent of college grads said that they had never worked in a field related to their majors. So why should I pay an average of 32,405 dollars for something that I may not even use. I just can’t fathom paying that much money for something that is not guaranteed to be useful. I live on a small Indiana farm and our only source of income is what comes from the farm. If you know anything about farming that is not very much money. How do you expect my family to be able to pay upwards of 90,000 dollars for schooling, including both of my brothers.
I feel that there must be something that you can do about this issue. I wouldn’t consider my family poor, nor or anywhere close to rich, and there is still no way that we could pay for college without being in debt. I think you could do something to make college more affordable. If you could find some way to make college free that would be amazing, but I know that may not be possible. If there is any way that you could lower tuition or even make housing and book rentals cheaper, it would help out students all over the US.
Sincerely,
Zachary