The cost of a college education is becoming a serious national issue. With the cost of tuition and fees rapidly increasing, colleges are afraid of scaring off students. Daniel Casse and Bruno Manno, journalists from Academic Questions, examined the average price of attending a university for a bachelor’s degree. According to these journalists, “The cost of four years of tuition along with room and board at an Ivy League School may well exceed $120,000” (Casse and Manno 3). This figure does not correlate with every student attending a college, but is an average cost based on other figures that were examined. With expenses like these, many undergraduates are unable to continue with …show more content…
Malcolm Getz and John Siegfried, from the Department of Economics, list several explanations for the increasing cost of higher education. Increasing costs are caused by shortages of higher education inputs, increased average standards of living, and educated labor for faculty and administrators (Archibald and Feldman 1-6). To analyze each factor that contributes to the cost of higher education, the first explanation is the shortage of higher education inputs. This refers to the lack of students being enrolled in a college or university. Revenue of colleges come from the enrollment of students and the money they pay to attend. With less students enrolling, colleges are lacking income that they would receive from students who enroll. Another factor is the higher average standards of living. As the price of goods and services go up, higher education costs rise in order to afford it (Archibald and Feldman 4). 70 to 80% of a university’s budget goes toward wages and benefits to staff members (Archibald and Feldman 6). In order for Faculty and Administrators to provide better services for students, higher education must raise their costs in order to stabilize the amount of money spent on education. Although, after reading discussions about the topic of college revenue spending, many parents are wondering; are …show more content…
nationwide. For the reasons listed above about the cost of higher education, this money is spent on other factors. Thus preventing many colleges and universities to spend it on higher quality education. Journalists from the Journal of Higher Education state that, “A college or university can only achieve higher quality if it is willing and able to pay higher educational costs” (Archibald and Feldman 3). In other words, these journalists believe that if a college or university chooses not to invest money in higher quality education, their quality of education will remain stagnant. Strategies that result in poor consequences are applied in order to lower costs and increase quality in higher education. One plan to achieve this goal is by adding more students to each class that is given. Adding more students to a class removes the ability for a student to have a one-on-one discussion with the professor. Another strategy is by increasing the number of courses a professor teaches. By doing so, it reduces research and the amount of knowledge a student receives in class (Archibald and Feldman 2). These actions that are taken in order to fix the quality of education from declining have not made any change in the