Blog Post 2

In Ethics in Higher Education I chose to read articles about the cost of college, student loans, and the cost benefit of going to college. Specifically,  I read Higher Education: Not What It Used to Be written by an anonymous author for the Economist, 9 Unbelievable Student Loan Horror Stories by Mandi Woodruff written for Yahoo! Finance Business Insider, and A Question of Honor by William Chance written for the American Scholar. For P2 I am interested in writing about the issue of the cost of a college education and how difficult it can be to pay for. Student loans, scholarships and grants only help so much, and can be difficult to earn or pay back. From reading these articles I learned that receiving loans is not easy and can cost in more than money. Also, I learned that the benefit of paying for college is not worth what it costs a lot of students. Furthermore, I learned that the inability to pay for college can lead to less honorable work completed by students. Through reading all of these articles, I mostly learned that paying for college is not easy and sometimes is deemed not worth the work it takes.

I would like to solve the problem of how difficult it is for students to receive help when paying for college. I would like to solve this problem because a lot of students struggle with paying for college and the opportunities to pay for it aren't available to all students. Also, the trade offs to receive aid are not worth it, like the risk of dropping out or being unable to pay them back. A solution to this problem may be starting payback program for students that begins 6 months after graduation. This amount of time would give the students time to get a job and be able to begin paying for college. It would be like a loan program, but run by the university and the time to start payments would be delayed to benefit the students while they transition into the “real world”. This program would relieve a lot of stress students feel due to the cost of college. Further, more students would be able to attend college and get a college education, being able to better their future.

I would like to target Tony Frank for my P2 proposal. This is a logical audience for this proposal because Tony Frank has influence on Colorado State University as he is the president of the University. He has the power to implement this plan and make it a reality. As the president he would have the power to change what needs to be changed to fix this problem. This issue is exigent for this audience because the issue is a present issue that will only get worse if no one does anything to improve it. As it is currently happening and if nothing is started to fix it, nothing will be done to end it and the numbers of students able to attend college will drop.