Why College Cost So Much

With 42.3 million people struggling to pay off the $1.3 trillion dollars worth of debt, it makes us question, how much is education worth to our society? According to an article from Medical Economics, it states that “a new study by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that jobholders with two years of graduate school earn substantially more money than do mere college graduates” (“Grad School means a higher salary,” 1997). The study revealed that on average college graduates made “twice as much” as their high school graduate peers. This is a extremely revealing study that shows how beneficial higher education is and suggests the need for college but that does not inherently justify the costs. College tuition has steadily

Instinctively, one would assume it would be to help the student but research shows that “Government data suggest that only 21 cents of each new dollar state universities have obtained over the past 20 years actually went to instructional purposes” (Vedder). This enlightening statistic reveals that hardly any of the money gone to college goes to actually helping students with their learning, preferring higher salaries and other superfluous luxuries. It becomes clear to see that most of the spending is done for the benefit of the institutions rather than the students. Ronald Ehrenberg in his article “Why College Costs So Much” says, “provosts and presidents have an infinite appetite for money to pay for new, bigger, or better academic programs… Because their rival institutions are also seeking to improve their own programs, no investment is ever enough. While most of these expenditures serve to improve society's capacities for research and learning, some of them simply cancel each other out, like advertisements for competing brands of soda” (Ehrenberg). Ehrenberg argues that the colleges are focusing their spending on competing with other colleges in an effort to move up in rankings for more enrollments. Colleges are funnelling their funds into unnecessary luxuries and having the students foot the

Richard Vedder states that from 1984 to 2004, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “College tuition has risen by 289 percent” (Vedder). The price for higher education has nearly tripled in two decades while the wages has moved nowhere near that amount. Vedder also states that “It took two months' income for the typical family to pay annual tuition when I entered North western University in 1958; today's family has to devote half its annual earnings” (Vedder). College used to be affordable, but now it is simply getting more and more expensive as time goes on. Student debt has been a major source of stress for many families and young adults leading to increasing numbers of depression, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, suicide and the list goes on and on. In our supposed “forward-thinking” society, we should spurn the greedy actions of the educational institutions that prey on naive