Argument Essay
As Apostle Paul exclaimed, “Money is the root of all evil.” Money has created problems since before Jesus walked this earth. In today’s world money continues to cause many of the same problems and arguments as it did back during the times of the Bible. As a high school senior, I have seen first hand the stress, arguments, and problems caused by the massive amounts of money needed to pay for college. But is college too expensive?
The average cost of college is about twenty thousand dollars per year. For a four year degree that’s about eighty thousand dollars! That’s a lot of money and commitment, especially for an eighteen-year-old kid coming out of high school. Recently there have been proposals of some sort of reduced collegiate tuition or free four-year college tuition for students. This is a horrible idea and here’s why: inflation.
In economics, printing more money and giving everyone more and more money leads to inflation. This will cause the prices of products to go up to match the increase in spending as well as the value and the power of each dollar will decrease tremendously. The same goes for a college degree. If college was free everyone would get a degree, and its value would be weakened tremendously. The importance of college now is to be better prepared for your career and therefore paid more in the future to offset the price of your schooling. But this would be eliminated if schools were free, there would be no incentive to pay higher wages. Free college tuition would also cause the class sizes to increase by an extreme amount making each class more difficult and harder to learn. The high prices of college give students a reason to graduate and succeed in college, if it were free more students would drop out because there are little to no consequences. This is not even considering the economic effects of having a free college. Taxes will increase dramatically because, as I have found out the hard way, nothing is truly free. So instead of paying eighty thousand dollars over four years in tuition, you end up paying thousands more than that over time from property taxes. Another downfall is that even with free college tuition it will still not create any more jobs. The number of jobs available and workers employed vary depending on the economy and how strong the market is. The number of people with a college degree will increase but that alone will not solve the problem of unemployment in the United States.
To sum up, free four-year college tuition is ridiculous and problematic, to say the least. Free education might seem like a good idea to a poor college student or intimidated high schooler, but it will cause major problems in the future. This would increase property taxes, decrease the value of each degree, not help unemployment, and cause an increase in college dropout rates. Instead of making tuition-free for everyone, we should help inform the public of the importance of saving and creating a college fund as well as give more financial aid to students who need it the most. This would still allow equal opportunities no matter how wealthy a student is to be able to attend college and be successful in the future.
