Why Does College Tuition Increase So Much

1102 Words5 Pages

Max Herrera
ECO 201
Prof Berch
Why Has College Tuition Increased So Much? A few decades ago in America, the baby boomer generation paid for college with the minimum wage salary they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, tuition started tom increase faster than the rate of inflation, which in turn forced our generation now, the millennial generation, to take on huge educational debt. This leaves us where we are today, a generation of students graduating with more debt than they can handle. It’s an unfortunate reality we live in, but how exactly did this happen? There are a couple of theories that explain why the sudden rise intuition happened and why it happened so fast. One is that colleges are spending …show more content…

According to College Tuition is Getting More Expensive. Here's Who's Actually to Blame. By Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, colleges are constantly increasing their administrative staff, which receives large salaries; this causes the tuition to go up. As stated by US news in the Surprising Causes of Those College Tuition Hikes by Kim Clark, "Public universities spent almost $4000 per student per year on administration, support, and maintenance in 2006, up more than 13 percent, in real terms over 1995. And they spent another $1200 a year on services such as counseling, which was up 23 percent. Meanwhile, they spent about $8700 a year on classroom instruction for each student, up about 9 percent." These numbers show that in order to keep up with the rising cost of non-instructional resources colleges are forced to raise the price of …show more content…

This issue has made its way to the attention of the Obama administration. The solution to this problem was the development of a “college scorecard”. With this scorecard “You’ll be able to see how much each school’s graduates earn, how much debt they graduate with, and what percentage of a school’s students can pay back their loans,” according to Obama. This tool will aid in controlling what schools charge since it provides transparency to the costs of attending the