College Student Debt Essay

1797 Words8 Pages

About 17.4% of Americans endure the affliction of college student loans. That’s about forty five million people who have borrowed student loans. But looking into the past, the 50s and 60s specifically that was not the case: the average college student's tuition was free or had a very low fee of a thousand dollars or less. Comparing this to the ever mounting 1.76 trillion US dollars of college debt, there's obviously a huge need for reform as this sets many young students into debt early on. College student loan debt is one of the most punishing grievances that affects the lives of most young adults living in America this 21st century. Although this affects other populations more than others.
Colleges have historically served the fortunate …show more content…

However student college loans are a modern innovation. The reasons why loans are necessary for college students is expressed in the article by the organization Association of Public Land-Grant Universities, the article titled What is the typical debt load for graduates of four-year public universities? In this article it speaks about the hardships that college students typically go through. One of them being the lack of funds to pay for college. This is where college loans come into play. The US started using loans in 1958 because colleges shifted from federally funded to state and locally funded. Ordinarily the prices of college tuition started to rise. This brought questions of how to pay for college. The federal government implemented the student loan system like today's. The average cost of tuition in the US is about nine thousand US dollars. The average college student spends one thousand dollars on college supplies on things like books and paper. This doesn't even include the rent or the price of food or other necessities. Secondly the article used above also mentions that. Most colleges in the US don't have programs for college students that may be less academically inclined; only the top high scoring students get fully paid scholarships. 60% of Americans go to college and of those only about 0.1% of Americans get a full free college education. The opportunity for …show more content…

Comparing this to Denmark, which pays students nine hundred dollars monthly to attend college. This is completely unheard of in the US never in history has the US offered money to college students. In the document Council on Foreign Relations Is Rising Student Debt Harming the U.S. Economy? Posted by the Council on Foreign Relations it compares what each country's students do to pay college tuition and what it does to the economy. The American economy has been severely affected by the 1.76 trillion dollars in student loans as the number rises so does the tuition. Even if a college student has a career it still takes most people sixty years to pay off the loans. And the reason why the government won't revert back to the model used in the sixties is because it would be a long process and add tax dollars onto the payer because that's how the federal government funded the states university, and the federal government can hyperfocus on the other problems that take up 4.9 trillion dollars the treasury has. Focusing on that same issue using the document above states it says that the reason that many students are in debt is because to go to college the average wage would need to be 1.8 more times money that the average person with a high school diploma. Even the other advanced countries like Germany understand the dire need for