College Tuition Should Not Be Free Essay

College tuition has always been what you look at when applying for a college and it becomes a determining factor on whether you can attend or not.Tuition in public four year colleges have seen an increase of 31 percent in 10 years and 747.8 percent since 1963. Free college programs would only cover the tuition cost but the other expenses would be left to the students. There have only been eighteen states that do not have any free college programs while the rest have state sponsored or few eligibility limits. The National Center for Education Statistics has projected that 16.8 million undergraduates were enrolled in college as of 2022. College tuition should not be free due to the fact that students would still be left with large debts,

The article states that :"Tuition is only one expense college students have to pay and accounts for anywhere from 28.9% to 73.6% of total average college costs."(source # 2) In other words, that tuition is not the only expense that college students would have to pay but it only amounts to a percentage of the total cost. What this means is that college students would not be free from having a student debt once their tuition is covered and that they would still have to pay for other unaccounted expenses. Another example demonstrated in the article would be," Tuition accounts for just 20% of the average community college students budget, which runs $18,830 annually on average."(source #2) This means that tuition is not that big of a cost when compared to students an average budget annually. This shows that covering tuition cost for college students is not that much help because they are capable of paying the cost of it. This goes to show that college tuition is not that much of an expense when compared to the expenses needed and that it amounts to a small part of student

The article states " it will force states to move existing resources into higher education and away from other state priorities like health care, prisons, roads, and k-12 education"(source #2) What this means is that all resources used for necessities would have to go towards paying institutes in order to cover tuition cost. This would mean that, the priorities of cities would have to shift towards covering tuition cost, this would leave less money for schools who build students paths towards college. The evidence also states that " free colleges funded by tax dollars would cost every adult tax payer $1,360 a year, or $77,500 over a lifetime." (source #2) This technically means that, taxpayers would have to pay $1,360 annually in order for the tuition cost of a college student to be covered. This shows that an adult taxpayer would have to pay much more in taxes just for college students to not pay tuition when they could use this money for their own needs such as health care. While some may argue that everyone has the opportunity to go to college, not all students would seem benefited and they would not be free of debt. However, it would not only be the students who would be affected but it would also be taxpayers and not all taxpayers are people who have had a college education. All of this summed up would mean that students would not