Jessica Guglielmo
English 001- Section 054
Katherine McCaffery
25 September 2018
Ideal College with No Student Debt
In the U.S. alone there are more than 44 million borrowers who collectively owe $1.5 trillion in student loans. The average student in the Class of 2016 has $37,172 in student loan debt. (Friedman 2018). These statistics are absolutely absurd and may drive people to believe that a college education is not worth it. Not only may it rive people to believe this, it is already a problem happening. A college level education is necessary for getting a job, especially in the United States, yet is far too expensive in this day and age, which causes many students to deter from attending college.
The film Ivory Tower dove into the world of higher education, including problems and alternatives that arise today. One problem we see arising is the shift of higher education from a public good to a private good. This means that collegiate level education is now a rival and excludable good, meaning if you do not pay for it you cannot receive it. The ideal education is a public good but has now been abandoned as a private good in order to receive power and diversification. Colleges in the US should be seen as an opportunity to enhance our commonwealth along with boosting the economy, not one or the other. Unfortunately, higher education can and never will be a pure public good because of its high demand. Public goods have positive externalities and not all the benefits accumulate towards the students. Society also benefits when more people have a college level education. Today’s jobs are more knowledge based and require certain advanced technical skills. If more people were able to be credible for higher paying jobs, more people would be able to take them. This would result in a better economy because of the extra millions of dollars circulating throughout, and when people have more money they tend to spend more on luxury goods. Student debt can take away from this because many people now have loans to pay off for years. Many people do not pay off their debt until they are in their fifties to sixties. That is a burden put on yourself for in some cases thirty plus years that should not be required to obtain a high job.
In Ivory Tower the president of Harvard University said, “In order to go up the ladder everybody has to keep adding more programs and more facilities at a faster rate of their competitors. That became the model. We have a product that is so expensive that a lot of people cannot pay for it and they have to go in debt. It just is not viable” (Ivory Tower). Colleges are no longer making education their top priority, rather they are spending millions of dollars on high-tech facilities and making tuition increase in response to that. An example of an unnecessary facility is the new Allen N. Reeves Football Complex at Clemson University.
“Some of the highlights of Clemson’s new $55 million, 140,000 square-foot football complex include...
