Student Loans and Rising Tuition Fees: A Looming Threat We Can’t Ignore
Every fall, high school seniors throughout the world begin their long, grueling journey towards pursuing higher education. Many of them fret over their admissions essays and worry about whether they will get accepted into their dream school.
But, more than anything else, these students are most concerned about the rising cost of tuition and the student loans they’ll have to take out to pay for their degrees. Over the past few decades, post-secondary tuition fees have risen exponentially. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, university tuition has risen by a whopping 945% since 1980.
Clearly, there’s a lot that can be done to combat the problem of rising tuition and the student loan epidemic, but it’s important to understand what ignited this situation in the first place.
It’s no surprise that graduating from university leads to a better job, a higher salary, and a more comfortable life in general. In fact, post-secondary graduates earned approximately 90% more compared to those with only a high school diploma, according to a 2010 study by the College Board.
This overwhelming benefit of higher education has led to a rise in university attendance throughout the years, and it has become a simple case of supply and demand. With such a high demand for higher education, universities and colleges have responded by raising tuition fees. But that isn’t the only reason why tuition is unreasonably expensive; student loans are also contributing to this ongoing crisis.
Federal, state, provincial — every kind of government encourages its youth to attend higher education, since an educated workforce is not only more stable and productive, but also better for society in general. Government-subsidized student loan programs such as the Federal Student Aid Program in the United States have cropped up throughout the world. Although these programs make higher education more attainable to the everyday student, they also have a deeper, more detrimental effect to the system.
As mentioned before, the simple system of supply and demand has allowed colleges and universities to raise tuition fees in response to rising demand, but government-subsidized loans have also played an important part in this crisis. As a reaction to the increased number of students pursuing higher education, these institutions have raised tuition fees because they know that the government has created a steady, constant stream of income through a seemingly endless supply of student loans.
In essence, although the government had a sincere goal of making higher education more affordable, subsidized student loan programs have artificially inflated demand and have only made debt-free tuition inaccessible.
Of course, the future isn’t as bleak as many may make it out to be. There is a wide variety of different solutions to the tuition and student loan crises, such as Bernie Sanders’ free college proposal. However, in many cases, the simplest option is often the best. Instead of offering every student a degree (which would only serve to flood the labor market and eliminate any advantage that a degree offered), students should be encouraged to explore alternative forms of education and employment.
However, that’s just one way to combat these issues. Another method is to revolutionize the entire system itself. As seen with many other essential products and services, the free market has constantly offered a superior alternative to government-run systems, and there’s no reason that a similar formula can’t be applied to higher education.
Universities and colleges should be treated like any other business, forced to compete with each other for students. This incentivizes these institutions to offer better services at the best possible price, in contrast to many current offerings.
In fact, not only will a free-market education system lower costs, but it will end the bloated, bureaucratic nature of colleges and universities today. Take, for example, the California State University System. A study by a professor at the California Polytechnic University, Pomona, revealed that, from 1975 to 2008, the number of teaching staff rose by 3%, whereas the number of administration staff rose by a whopping 221%. Needless to say, bureaucracy is just one of the many needless aspects of the current higher education system that the free market can eliminate.
Degree factories are also another important issue to address when discussing free-market higher education. These for-profit universities and colleges are plagued with inflated grades and offer degrees without teaching anything of substance. Instances like these are often brought up in response to the liberalization of higher education, but it is important to distinguish between the act of teaching and the act of licensing.
A free-market education system would delegate the actual teaching to universities and colleges, whereas the government would license degrees through standardized testing. Not only would this system encourage universities and colleges to provide their students with actual, beneficial knowledge, but it would also prevent inflated grades and degree factories.
In the end, regardless of which solution triumphs above the rest, it’s important to not only foster a sense of optimism, but also a sense of pragmatism in today’s youth. The ability to look into the future and analyze one’s own decisions, especially in the early years of life, is a skill that can’t be compensated by a degree.
