Extreme college costs limit students and their families

by Jon Black

Each year students across the country set out from high school with dreams of attending prestigious universities such as Stanford, Brown, Willamette or Princeton. And each year, after a look at the yearly tuition to these institutions, those dreams are shattered.

If students expect economic success in life, they generally have to attend college. The median wage for college graduates is still far greater than the wage for those who have never graduated from college. Unfortunately, colleges are restricting access to their facilities more each year with their ever-increasing hikes in tuition and fees.

College costs already are almost two and a half times what they were just 15 years ago — and they are still rising. Government assistance can’t hope to keep up with increasing costs, and more and more, many schools are becoming out of reach for people with limited funds.

For students planning to pursue their higher education, the cost for attending private and other competitive public institutions are quickly skyrocketing out of reach. Over the past 15 years, average college tuition has increased 234 percent. Inflation, on the other hand, has only increased 74 percent. In other words, students today are paying one and a half times as much to attend college as kids did only a decade and a half ago.

Each year, families spend a greater percentage of their money to send their students to college. In 1980, the average family with a child in a private college spent 17 percent of their income on tuition and fees. That has ballooned to 38 percent today.

Private institutions become even more private each year. Many students are nearly as limited in their choice of colleges by their financial situation as by their academic records. If a financially challenged student doesn’t receive a decent offer of financial aid from sources outside of the school, the school has little incentive to help the student. The bottom line for many colleges is money. If a student who can’t afford to pay can easily be replaced with one who can, why would a college offer more financial aid?

Part of the problem of runaway costs comes from an act of Congress designed to decrease tuition costs. The Higher Education Act of 1965 established several ways to receive financial aid — grants, loans, and work-study programs. Colleges responded to increased financial aid by increasing tuition. If a student was willing to pay the full cost of college before, with financial aid, colleges believed that the student would still pay as much, and the college would receive extra money from the government.

Colleges will continue to increase tuition as long as there are students willing to pay what is asked of them. Instead of giving colleges an excuse to charge even more each year, colleges need incentives to limit tuition each year. If the government were to award money to those colleges that worked to limit their tuition fees, maybe the rapid growth of the cost of secondary education could be brought under control.

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