Elharar !1
Mor Elharar
Mrs.Crocker
American Literature
3 May 2015
College Tuitions
Is it possible to imagine a tuition- free United States where one wouldn't have to pay for their college tuition. Put yourself in the shoes of a college student getting a letter in the mail saying they got accepted into their dream school and tuition-free. One shouldn't have to pay just to get a better education. Education is very important and without it, one does not get the many advantages it offers. A lot of occupations require a college degree in order to even be considered for the job. The issue with college nowadays is that it’s way too expensive and most people cannot afford it. Yes, there may be FAFSA which is financial aid, grants, and scholarships available to assist students but those still wouldn't cover half of it. According to a New York Times writer,
“public investments in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation adjusted dollars, than in the 1960s.”(Campos) The major problem here is that society is paying for an education that we need. How are people in the U.S. that don't have the money to get into college supposed to get the education they need in order to make a living or start their lives? Some people don’t even end up getting the education they want due to the fact that they simply cannot afford college tuition. If we just figure out what we can do about college tuitions and how we can change this, life would be very different.
Most people in the U.S. would like to get a college education. To do so, students would have to pay for their tuition, books, supplies one would need for each class, and if one wants to live on

Elharar !2 campus they would have to pay for their dorms as well. Since the college tuition keeps rising, attending to college has become an issue. One would have to go to college for four years to get their degree in something. According to a Time’s writer, “nine out of ten freshmen that are in college think that they will get their bachelor’s within those four years.”(Marcus) “Studies show that the U.S Department of Education reports that fewer than half actually will graduate within those four years.”(Marcus) About 45 percent will not have finished their bachelors even after six years.
This means that they have to pay more each semester just to finish their bachelors. On the contrary, Jon Marcus tells us that “the moderate cost of just one more added year at a four-year public university or college is $63,718 which is covering the tuition, fees, books, and living expenses. In other words, the longer you take to finish your degree, the more you spend on each year.”(Marcus) Considering that some of these people don’t have the money to pay for college each year, they are still willing to pay just to finish their degrees because they want the education. For example, according to another TIME’s article, “When Alex Nichols started as a freshman at the University of Mississippi, he felt sure he’d earn his bachelor’s degree in four years.
Five years later, and Nichols is back on the Oxford, Mississippi campus…”(Marcus) This is one example of students that want to have a good career but are being affected by the additional cost of tuition for each extra year that they stay.
The rise of college tuition had all started back to the 1970s when Americans thought that college was only for the wealthy. This had changed after “World War II with the Servicemen's
Readjustment Act of 1944” better known as the GI Bill of Rights according to Claudio Sanchez.
Laws that were made during this time aimed to make college more affordable for veterans that thought they only needed a high school education and never planned on doing anything after

Elharar !3 that. According to a professor at the University of Kentucky, John Thelin, “they could have pushed school costs higher — however didn't, on the grounds that states grasped the thought.”(Thelin) The economy during the time wanted them to spend a large