Colleges benefit from tuition cuts

Colleges benefit from tuition cuts

Shane Wade
Columnist

In an era of education budget cuts and rising tuition costs, Tennessee’s University of the South, better known as Sewanee, is moving in a different direction than most colleges and cutting its tuition by 10 percent.

Their unconventional approach to solving financial woes may very well be a solution to the rising cost of higher education.

For the most part, colleges and universities are raising tuition out of necessity to stay afloat, not just to pay for higher salaries or luxurious building projects. But we’re paying more money for an education that isn’t necessarily of higher quality and a degree that means less and less.

According to the Business Insider and the Trading Report, the unemployment rate for college graduates under the age of 25 is more than nine percent. 24.5 percent of all retail sales persons have a college degree and about two million recent college graduates that are currently unemployed. While college degrees have a substantial impact on one’s future career and earnings, it means little if students are held back by debt and unpaid student loans while working low-salary jobs.

Public schools shouldn’t rely on increases in tuition as a response to funding cuts by state legislators because it brings them into the realm of cost dominated by private schools. Once the tuition cost of public schools enter that realm, students may begin to choose private over public, further endangering the existence of public universities that also have to compete with the academic quality of private institutions.

By removing the financial barrier that a high tuition places, colleges increase the populace’s accessibility to higher education. Both out-of-state and in-state students that would have initially been dissuaded from college by the cost will be more apt to apply and students in danger of dropping out because of the cost will stay.

While an increase in the number of individuals attending college isn’t clearly good on its own, an increase of students coupled with higher standards and expectations will remove the individuals that do not contribute to the well-being of the campus community, promote a spirit of excellence on campus and raise the school’s reputation. This will also increase the number of endowments and donations from private donors and alumni.

Sewanee’s philosophy leads them to believe that if they “lower the cost of higher education, people might owe a debt to society, rather than to a bank.” The role of colleges and universities ought to be primarily about providing an education to students, not providing an education to just those whom can afford it.

While today’s higher tuitions are a sign of necessity rather than greed, decreasing the accessibility of higher education and devaluing the college experience with low quality education isn’t the solution. Although lowering tuition by just 10 percent doesn’t make a large dent in the expense of college overall, it has both a real and symbolic meaning to struggling families. It’s time for public colleges to follow Sewanee’s lead, embrace minimalism and realize that education and students should come first.

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