1.6 trillion dollars. That is roughly the student debt total in the United States according to whitehouse.gov. Many United States citizens have to deal with the problem of paying for college right as they graduate high school. Some do not even go to college because they cannot afford it, or because they simply do not want to deal with a storm cloud of student debt looming over them for the majority of their life. It’s time to change. The total cost of college in the United States needs to be cheaper. If people did not have to deal with the cost of college or the weight of student loans, the population would have an overall higher education rate. With more people able to pay for college, more people will attend college. The University of the People, an …show more content…
The colleges still need money to run, so if the students are not paying for tuition and all the other costs (books, housing, etc.), then the money will have to come from somewhere else: their pocket. With the United States moving toward cheaper or even free college, the money would inevitably come from taxes. The majority of the money would most likely come from the population with a higher tax bracket (“Should College Be”). Here a valid point is being made that people with more money shouldn’t be forced to pay for others’ education. Although this may be true, the income gap would be smaller if more people had access to a college degree, creating more balanced tax brackets to pay the inevitable taxes for tuition. Patricia Smith, a professor at the University of Michigan, endorses that “Economists at Harvard studied a ‘natural experiment’ in which a student loan lender had to cancel all its loans… [people whose loans were forgiven] were more likely to switch to a higher paying job”(“Would Free College”). Because the students had their loans forgiven, they got higher-paying jobs. This, in turn, would reduce the income