College Worth The Cost Essay

One trillion dollars- the national student debt in the United States has now surpassed one trillion dollars. To put that into perspective, Bill Gates would have to pay his entire net worth over eleven times to cover that amount. Knowing this, the solution seems obvious: students should attend cheap, public universities, so they can minimize their debt. After all, how different can the education at these schools be than the highly selective, private colleges? Still, some students are continuing to spend upwards of fifty thousand dollars every year to further their education at prestigious private universities. To what avail? Is there any real benefit to attending these colleges? As it turns out, studying at these fancy colleges actually does

After all, that’s what a college education is- an investment. Jacques Steinberg points this out in an article he wrote titled “Is Going to an Elite College Worth the Cost?” According to Steinberg, alumni of the country’s most elite universities typically earn about forty percent more than those from non-selective colleges. This was measured only ten years after high school graduation. The effect that earning a degree from a selective college starts almost immediately after graduation and lasts for an entire life. As a matter of fact, over the course of a lifetime, that additional forty percent can add up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars- more than enough to cover the extra cost of a prestigious education. For his article, Steinberg interviewed Professor Eide, chairman of the economics department at Brigham Young who said, “I don’t think the costs of college are going up faster than the the returns on graduating from an elite private college” (Steinberg). For now, at least, it appears that investing more in education pays off in the long