Written by Maeva M
I wish I could tell you “If you really want to do this job when you grow up, you’ll be okay and you’ll succeed. All you need is determination”. But I can’t. For years now, college tuition fees –the fees we have to pay to access University, so basically, what a year in college costs- have been doing nothing but raising, in the UK and in the USA. Indeed, about 2 months ago, George Osborne, Britain’s First Secretary of State, announced that universities with “high-quality teaching” will be allowed to raise their tuition fees in the years to come. Furthermore, according to data from the Labor Department, the cost of US college tuitions grew by nearly 80 percent between August 2003 and August 2013. This growth is nearly twice faster than the growth of medical care prices.
Getting into high school is a hard social experience for most teenagers, but going to college is something most of them will never be able to experience, because it takes 5 months of their mother’s wage to get them to do 1 year in college. Indeed, according to the College Board, the average cost of tuition fees for last year’s school year was $31,231 at private colleges and $9,139 for state residents at public colleges.
How are we supposed to expect our future children to have a great career if we cannot expect that from ourselves because our parents cannot afford it? How will we pay our children’s tuition fees if we can’t go to college because we can’t pay our own tuition fees?
I get that the department of education needs money, because we’re in time of crisis, but how are the poor students supposed to go to college to get an education then? How is it fair that if they do go to college, they’ll have to work 60 hours a week to get the money to pay back the loans they’ve taken, when the rich students will have plenty of time to study? Or that they will be in dept for 20 years after college is over for them? How can you expect the students not to fail then?
Tuition fees create a gap between poor and rich students that is really hard to bridge. The social barrier is stronger than ever and becoming a teacher is not something most students can even consider right now. When you have to pay 32 thousand dollars to do so, I get why you would not even want to try. How is it normal that money has become more important than intelligence? That if you’re the best student of your class, you might not be the one who’ll go to the best school, because you don’t have the money to? How is it fair, that now, students are not picked because of how clever they are or how much potential they have, but because their parents can afford it?
I think something needs to be done so that students have the means to go to college without having to pay enormous amounts of money, because not all students are 100% sure they’ll graduate in the end of college, and if they don’t, they won’t have any way to pay back the loans they took to get in. But if they don’t go to college, they’ll have to question whether they can have children or not, live in an apartment or a house, buy clothes and shoes, or even go to a restaurant once in a while. What kind of a life is that? What kind of life do we want for our future children and grandchildren? What kind of life do we want for ourselves?
