The Truth of the College Price Tag

If You Want A Degree, It's Going To Cost You

     Oh, the college education. When I think of the means of getting a degree and the best four years of any educated man's life, college comes to mind. When I think of one of the biggest cash grabs to plague the United States of America, college also comes to mind. Higher education is not cheap by any means. One may be better off selling their soul to some higher being just to pay tuition — not including housing costs of course.

     But why is the price of spending four or more years learning semi-relevant stuff so incredibly high? Well, before we get to that, lets discuss just how high these costs are. Compared to about 35 years ago, college tuition has nearly doubled in price to an average of $9,139, and it is still increasing. "Well Hugh Mungus, isn't that huge price tag due to inflation"? Ha, no, it's not. In fact, tuition has risen at a much higher rate than inflation. To add, in 1980, state funding for college had already increased by 390 percent from 11.1 billion to 48.2 billion within the previous 20 years. So what's the deal with the weighty price tag? Despite the important positions professors have in educating young college minds, the money is not really going into their pockets. Instead, it is going into the pockets of the enormous amount of University administrators that colleges seem to have "picked up" in the past 30-40 years. With the information Campos gives in the article, it's a 221 percent increase from 3,800 dollars to 12,183 in the California Polytechnic University alone. That's not all, many more high-ranking university administrators are making seven digit salaries from the tuition of students, and for no significant reason. As Campos states, there is no truly valid argument to defend this trend, and certainly no "alternative facts" to justify it. As for how to fix it, we need policies to establish limits on the amount and salary of administrative staff, but it seems like that time is not coming any time soon. So students, and most likely the children of said students, will continue to pay large amounts of cold, hard cash to earn a degree and hopefully get a moderately satisfying job.