Is high tuition necessary?

Anna Smoak

Everyone knows that tuition is rising, at some alarming rates. I recetly turned on the tv to find a journalist reporting that tuition would soon be in the hundreds of thousands. In fact, tuition is currently increasing at a rate higher than that of inflation. But why is tuition growing so high, especially when so many people are suffering from hard economic times? Are colleges just getting greedy, or do they really need the money parents are grudgingly signing over to the college of their childs choice?

Kevin Carey blames the US News and World Reports for the high and rising college tuitions. But what he really means is that college rankings have a lot to do with high tuition. And as colleges keep competing, the tuition will inevitably keep rising. 26% of the college ranking is based on how much colleges spend. According to the above article, this "spending" is due to a mixture of actual college spending, but also research oppurtunities, which depends largely on professor salaries.

One way to stop this problem is to perhaps not weigh so much on the rankings. The rankings are not always agreat indicator of the quality of education. Another possible solution would be increasing the amount of state aid that colleges receive, which has drastically been reduced over the past few years. The fact is, if we want our spending to go down, and our educational quality to go up, we need to increase our government spending on education. So in this case, we need to spend money to save money.