P2: College Costs

Jacob Jones

Blog Post 2

             In Ethics in Higher Education, several articles caught my attention on the topic of the cost of college tuition, how the prices have dramatically increased over the years, and how scholarships and grants are directly affecting the costs. The articles that particularly caught my attention were Ethical Values: Economic Costs (EHE 107), UC Student Investment Proposal (EHE 117), Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi (EHE 123), and Higher Education: Not What It Used to Be (EHE 111). Each of these sources were connected with the aspect of college tuition and the debt that is burdening so many students. For the P2 assignment, I am having to take the responsibility of addressing a potential solution for solving a problem that is currently happening and effecting someone or something in some way. The problem that I am bringing attention to is the ever-growing cost of college tuition across the nation, along with how that is hindering more people to attend and how the graduate students are weighed down with these large sums of debt. My solution will effectively and manageably be able to, in the long run, benefit more people that do not have the funds to currently attend college themselves. If correctly put into motion, my solution will not only dramatically raise attendance of universities but also pull in more money for the universities due to increased student body. In the article Higher Education: Not What It Used to Be, a graph is visually given to show how the cost of university per student has risen by almost five times the rate of inflation since 1983, making it less affordable and increasing the amount of debt a student must take on. Consequently, ending up with two-thirds of graduate students today taking out loans and doubling the debt per student in the past 15 years.

             The solution I propose is solely to increase the student body population of colleges across the nation and show that with lowering the tuition costs, we can achieve just that. The only way that we will be able to make this goal a reality is to completely abolish the concept of grants and scholarships and have every single college drop their tuition significantly. Grants and scholarships are the leading reason to increased cost of tuition, because they are essentially “free money” the institutions are lending to students that is never actually paid back. By losing this free money that is be lent to students the institutions have to raise their costs to account for what funds are not being made, resulting in dramatically increased costs at a rapid pace. At first this idea may seem ludicrous and unable to produce results. However, with bringing down the cost of tuition for every educational institute in North America and completely ridding grants and scholarships from the picture, colleges across the nation will be more populated thus bringing in more money and benefiting more people’s lives with higher education. If we can bring the cost of college down closer to the average income per household the results would be immense.

             The first stakeholder of this proposal would be specifically targeted to the entire student body of every university that is already currently in attendance. This proposal would directly upset a substantially large portion of students that are currently receiving grants or scholarships, yet it will significantly decrease their tuition cost and lower their debt upon graduation. This proposal is significantly positive for many people across the nation that are not able to afford college at its current costs. The increased number of people applying for colleges will bring in more money than each college is currently making.

             My second stakeholder would be every university/ higher education institute in North America. Although all of the universities would see this as a negative idea at first, it can become significantly beneficial and directly affect communities around the nation positively. The benefits to the solution that I am presenting could have incredible results that would easily trump the negative aspects of it. The amount of debt on graduate students would be dropped significantly and the amount of people in the nation pursuing higher education would increase rapidly.