The American higher education system has increased its price quite dramatically over the last twenty years. Due to this, there has been a very high amount of critics from prospective students and parents to the current college system. This problem has lead prospective students to take high amounts of loans to cover for their education costs and paying these loans in years. Although the endowments have increased, the price of college has not decreased, and this has been an outrageous problem for both the American and international communities. This problem has to lead to the biggest crisis with college student debt in the history of the United States, with the figure going over one trillion dollars. Thus, the research is going to have two objective target groups. The first group are going to be professors and experts in the field of economics; the professors are going to give their perspective on which have been the major causes of the overall inflation in the higher education of the United States, and the second group are going to be students from UVA which will answer what approximate amount of debt are they going to owe and how this debt is going to affect their lives personally. After collecting the pertinent data of the two groups of study and doing all the pertinent research, I will be able to answer what has lead to the massive increase in college tuition and if it is worth it for students to incur in these high amounts of debt.
Biffl, G., & Issac, J. (2002). Should Higher Education Students Pay Tuition Fees? European Journal of Education, 37(4), 433–455. doi:10.1111/1467-3435.00120
In this article, Renehan strives to address the significant negative consequences of the rise in college tuition how these consequences might affect the student regarding its income in the future, especially with the high amount of debt associated with the rising cost in college tuition. Finally, the author sought to address other viable alternatives instead of college to avoid high amounts of debts.
Regarding the strengths of the peer-reviewed article, we can notice that it has the right amount of supporting evidence to support the central claims; for instance, it uses graphical analysis to illustrate a cost and benefit monetary analysis of the decision of attending to college. Moreover, it also analyzes different economic groups regarding their decision making of attending college. This source is reliable because it acknowledges biases of people with different economic and political ideologies, and furthermore, it includes recent information to support its central claims; the only major limitation that I saw was that it also touched upon the graduate level of education which I will not discuss on the paper. This source helps with the cohesion of ideas in the paper because it covers a variety of topics linked with the costs of college tuition from a substantially unbiased perspective.
Tuition and Fees, Higher Education. (2014). Encyclopedia of Education Economics & Finance. doi:10.4135/9781483346595.n292
This article made by Ronald G. Ehrenberg focuses on the necessary foundations of the cost of college. It sought to explain how fees work and which are some viable options to get financial aid for these institutions of higher education.
The author gives useful background information to have a broader perspective on how the college system works regarding its tuition and fees; where is the money going? Moreover, it also states the differences between college education in different states of the U.S., it gives specific information about different states that helps the reader understand better the perspective of regular students at the moment of choosing their education options. The major limitation I see with this article is that it might be a bit too broad for the purpose of this study because it touches upon graduate education. Overall, this research provides valuable information for the study due to the fact that it touches on a variety of states, and it will help broaden the perspective of the study in the U.S.
Thelin, J. R. (2015). Why Did College Cost So Little? Affordability and Higher Education a Century Ago. Society, 52(6), 585–589. doi:10.1007/s12115-015-9953-8
In this article by John R. Thelin, he strives to analyze the context of why did college used to cost so little in the past, and why does it has risen so much in current times. Does this have to do with demand? Or the demand has remained flat, and it is due to operational factors?
The paper does a great job of analyzing the context by considering internal and external factors in the U.S, for instance, war. The paper analyzes the profile of the best universities at the undergraduate level and their cost in the mid 20th century, which is an excellent representation of the costs, prices, and affordability of college. Moreover, this article includes a plethora of statistical information like endowments and teaching salaries in the mid 20th century that helps the audience figure out why education has risen so much. This article is particularly valuable as research for my paper because it provides a considerable amount of background information to my topic of interest, and it is going to help extract some possible ideas to solve the problem from this article on the discussion section of this paper.
Approaches to Managing Costs in American Higher Education
Rahman, M. (2018). Approaches to Managing Costs in American Higher Education. Journal of Knowledge Globalization. doi: 10.1093/oso/9780190863494.003.0003
This paper, written by Mawdudur Rahman, focuses on the costs of the administrative part of the education sector. In recent years many papers have discussed the issues of cost management in higher education and have come to the conclusion that the American higher education system costs are not well managed. This paper strives to give an analysis of which are the operational costs that colleges incurred and possible ways of how to solve them. This paper provides a plethora of statistical information regarding the sources and distribution of the revenue of colleges; it is an excellent quantitative study. On the other hand, some of the statistics are from the 1970s, and these statistics will not be taken into account in the paper because they are outdated. However, this article does present valuable statistical information regarding the distribution of college revenue and other operational costs that will be useful for the analysis of the paper.
Williamson, T. (2018). An Exploration of Administrative Bloat in American Higher Education. Planning for Higher Education Journal. doi: 10.1093/oso/878012453494.003.0004 This article delves into how does the structure of American higher education is formed. It analyzes how the structure has grown over time and which extra functions have been attributed to this staff working in the education sector. Moreover, this paper tries to see every extra inch of excess fat or unnecessary expense that is being wasted on taxpayer dollars by the government. This paper holds a valuable amount of qualitative information regarding the funding and expensing dynamic currently hold by the administrative sector of the government in higher education. This article is particularly useful because it will help me look at strategies to mitigate bloat getting and get a better price for students and less money spent of the American taxpayer.
Carlos Cerna Reichmann 