The one thing no one asks us at 17: Buy a house or go to college? The average cost of a four-year university sums up to a single-family home. The never-ending increasing costs of college are out of control.
Around 46% of college students graduate with debt running from $1,000 to $300,000. This debt prevents new graduates from purchasing things like houses and cars.
Last year alone, the tuition rate increased 4%, making the average tuition cost in America just above $40,000 a year. This price does not include other expenses such as housing, food, books, and other miscellaneous things.
According to CNN.com, “ Harvard University charges $57,246 in tuition and fees per year for undergraduate students. When you add in housing, food, books, and other cost of living expenses, Harvard says you should expect to pay about $95,438 each year.”
This means that the average Harvard student who attends for four years would have paid/owed around $381,752, which is equivalent to a two-to-three-bedroom house in California, or a seven-bedroom home with three acres of land in Texas.
Student loans have extremely high interest rates, making it so that when you pay off your debt, you owe twice as much as you originally pulled out. The reason that tuition is rising is because of persistent inflation in America and reduced state funding.
Since states cut higher education funding, schools are more responsible for their staff. The demand for teachers – especially professors – increases every year, and with that is an increased salary to entice them to stay. Between the years 2020 and 2021, state funding decreased by about 6%, and in some states, was cut by more than $500 a student. This cut had a huge impact on schools’ budgets and tuition costs, forcing most of them to increase the cost of housing, tuition, student store items, and meal plans.
If the governors were to increase the schools’ budgets by 3 or 4%, this would lower student costs and make things much more affordable.
The cost of tuition in general is outrageous. Students start thinking about going to college at 16 or 17 years of age. We are forcing high schoolers to make a life-changing decision so young, and the government makes it very expensive. A lot of necessary jobs in America, such as doctors and teachers, require a higher education. However, if the American government makes higher education unaffordable, we are going to have a lot more demand than supply, and a lot of unemployment.
For example, nursing is one of the most in-demand jobs in America. For decades, hospitals have had so much demand that they sought outside resources. Nursing school is not only one of the hardest things to endure, but it is also very expensive. The cost of this degree turns a lot of people away, and therefore creates a high demand for nurses. The same thing happens for a lot of other professions as well.
Lastly, another problem with students coming out of college with so much debt is purchasing a house. Most mortgages require your debt-to-income ratio (DTI) to be 45% or lower, and having student debt increases your DTI – which isn’t ideal. This is one of the factors that holds students back from purchasing a house and taking a loan from the bank. When students graduate from college, most are worrying about finding a dream career in their field of study, or thinking about where they want to settle down for a while. This is a stressful time in someone’s life, and the government increases this stress by adding thousands of dollars in student debt and interest rates that add up every month.
All in all, if America reduced the amount of money college costs, fewer college students would struggle, and debt in America would significantly decrease.