Ballesteros 1

Anikent Ballesteros

Mrs. Tubbs

English 1301

November. 18, 2019

College has been known to provide higher levels of education towards those who seeks

knowledge, but to provide higher levels of education, colleges also asks for high levels of tuition.

With the required expenses, it starts to raise questions from people and those who are trying to

pursue college, is it worth it? Why is it expensive? Are there other options? Nobody enjoys

spending their hard-earned money towards college, they would rather spend it on something else,

but that’s just the reality. All of these leads to this educational issue, which why/how is college

expensive and still continuing to rise as time passes. This issue pretty known world wide, some

people may think it is valid, the college expenses makes sense and some people may also think

college expenses is simply outrageous, it all depends on how they see it and their opinions. My

current position on this educational issue is that I kind of agree with how colleges set their

expenses/tuitions because realistically, if you want to acquire the best of the best and the highest

of knowledge and education, expect it to come with a high price.

To start off, a little bit of information on the origination of this educational issue,

basically when and how it started to build up. From one of the sources, which is an article called

“Why college tuition is getting more expensive,'' the author stated “states have increased their

higher education budgets since the 1960s because of the explosive growth of the number of

students enrolled in college.” (Gabriel, 2015). Basically it started to become an upcoming issue
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all the way back in the 1960s because of the continuous rapid growth of students enrolling and

attending college, which also means that teachers/professors and staff has to also increase to

keep up with the number of students. The numbers continue to rise significantly years/decades

after the 60s as the popularity of college also increased to the point that going to college is a very

common thing to do after finishing high school. Also, according to the same article, state funding

towards colleges gradually dropped from 32% to 23% in 2003. But that’s still no match for how

state funding towards college was in the 1970s, which was 75%. Which all of this means that

colleges are still getting funds from their state government but not as much as before.

Getting higher education costs a lot. Higher education works operates on a system, it’s

not just simply teaching information to those who seek them, there’s a lot more that goes behind

it just like management and planning. Besides the tuition in college, there are also a bunch more

expenses that adds on, for example are books, books are heavily needed in college courses so

students are almost forced to purchase them from the school store or somewhere else. Books

prices also tends to inflate and deflate from time to time depending on the demands, in an article

called “WHY COLLEGE IS SO EXPENSIVE” by Mary McPherson, the author stated as an

example “The costs of books and periodicals rose 40 to 60 percent faster than inflation, largely

because we were purchasing so many of them abroad with a weak dollar”. (McPherson, 1985)
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Reflection: The purpose of this essay is to give insight to the readers about this certain

educational issue. The audience will most likely been my classmates and instructor, I hope to

teach them my opinion and position on this issue. I mainly started this essay with just free-

writing while adding information from the sources that I’ve chosen, this is a rough draft so it’s

pretty rough at the moment, it will definitely have a lot of changes after the peer review and the

making of the second draft.