Seeking Education Not Debt

The topic that I chose is college tuition. This particular topic interests me because recently I grew an interest in economics and then I wanted to see how education affected the economy and both neighborhood and ethnicity-based communities.When I was in 6th grade my sister was getting her college acceptance letters and due to insufficient funds, my sister couldn’t go to a college if she didn’t receive a scholarship. My sister being a medical major wanted to attend some of the nations top schools but due to the pricing of higher education, her options were limited.My sister eventually got into a private university for a full scholarship, however, if she didn’t get a scholarship she would graduate with 673,390 dollars worth of student loans. this is the cost of school excluding textbooks and overlooking medical school cost. Sometimes when I’m on the train I think about my future, I want to be an engineer that changes the face of technology and I want to attend MIT. I being an overachiever I also want to attend to Harvard for a law or business degree and thinking about these difficult goals I tell myself that if I ever want to see at least one of them come true I would have to work day and night and with a large amount of luck is the only way I can achieve one of my goals and with rising tuition cost and a fragile economy I can only wish for the best. We can try to change the problem as much as we possibly can by contacting our local politicians. During this research, I learned that the idea of free college was first really paid attention to when the Obama administration said Community College should be free if you have a GPA of at least 2.5 and parents who make less than $200,000 a year.

The problem with colleges is not that they are only expensive even though that is a part of the problem. The cause of the issue of tuition all starts with the name of the school for example when people hear the name Harvard they don’t usually tend to think about a lower middle class or working class individual , rather they think about the white male who wants to get a degree in law or business and this is a problem. According to the crimson Harvard is one of the leaders of colleges when it comes to accepting students who parents are making more than 630,000 a year at 15.1%.When we look at colleges we see the spectrum from best to worst. We all learn that the cream of the crop gets into the Ivy Leagues followed by the world-renowned schools such as Stanford, MIT, and CalTech. Then we hear about state schools and state schools and finally community colleges. To argue my point of why college tuition should be drastically lowered or be free to certain colleges is the numbers behind the scenes. The New York Times suggests that when the number of people graduating college increases the economy grows and expands. This eventually creates jobs and those two reasons are good enough reasons to start on lowering tuition. One of the main problems with college tuition is that it scares graduating 12th graders and this can be a problem not only to those students but to our society/economy as a whole. When one in four teens look at the cost of college they would give up on aspirations of becoming a doctor, engineer or lawyer. However, if we look at that student’s record we see that he gets straight A’s and has a solid GPA of 3.9 then we start wondering why is this student giving up an achievable dream of becoming a doctor.The tells us that even if he could get a full ride to college at UPenn he won’t be able to afford medical school so he decided it’s better to start working than hoping. Okay that’s perfectly okay a student with a GPA of 3.9 would find his/her way around the workforce and get a decent job. However, that’s a problem in itself . A majority of jobs offered to people with high school diplomas are factory jobs this would be a problem because if there is an ever decreasing number of factory jobs in the United States and lets say 4 million other students look at the price of college and one fourths of them decide to not attend college that will be another million people looking for the same job as our first student, a factory job, and that means that more workers, higher cost for hiring companies and when left with no options they would move to different countries for lower cost. Then, when we go back to the U.S where those 1 million with dreams of college lose their job, and now it would be harder to get accepted to any other jobs without a college degree and when this happens the economy loses money and the unemployment rate increases.

In contrary let's say that the full 4 million students can afford to go to college and when they graduate looking for jobs as highly qualified individuals they would attract incorporations from other countries and when this happens the economy goes up and the unemployment rate decreases because people are now able to go back to college for their degree since it’s cheaper and even if the individual is still not qualified for the job they want, they have more job options to choose from because of the new companies coming to the United States. Sometimes the largest issues in today’s society can be solved by one proposed bill and when that happens maybe somewhere out there a 5-year-old boy with dreams of being an engineer, who can’t afford it today might be able to look at his acceptance letter and think of his dream that still awaits him rather than think of the debt of chasing his dream.

Annotated Bibliography: here