Scouting the Territory
I stand the same on my topic idea, and believe that the price of college is an interesting topic which I can get a lot of information from. When googling information, the terms that got me the most information was "college tuition prices". This led me to a college cost calculator, graphs about the increase of tuition costs, and information about this increase in price. When looking for more information on this topic, a book that seems interesting is "The Price You Pay for College" by Ron Lieber, which seems to be assisting families in figuring out the financials involved with choosing a college. Another book that appears to be useful is "Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much" by Ronald Ehrenberg, that explains the increase in prices. After reading these articles, an issue that seems to be important is how difficult this is for families to manage, especially ones who are low-income or have many children that they need to assist in paying for college.
One of the resources I found is a college cost calculator website: https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/pay-for-college/college-costs/college-costs-faqs. This is useful to me because it can help me see how much tuition would be for people based off of many different circumstances, such as income level and out vs in state. This will help me make my argument stronger, since I have proof of the tuition costs. Another important resource I found is this website, which shows the rate of tuition growth over the last 20 years : https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/2017-09-20/see-20-years-of-tuition-growth-at-national-universities. This is especially useful to me because the growing tuition rates is what I am mainly focusing on, so this website helps outline the facts for me.
There are not huge controversies over my topic, because everyone is aware that the price of college is skyrocketing, along with the student debt. The two sides could be people who want college to be free for everyone and want all student debt to be erased, versus people who believe the current price for college is fair and that people who are in debt should face the consequences for their decisions.
One of the problems you should confront with this topic (or at least mention) is that so much of state college tuition is affected by the way the state government supports or does not support higher education in the state. The U.S. has long surrendered, under neoliberalism, any federal system for supporting public colleges -- beyond the legacy programs from long ago -- and so there are few systemic efforts to make college more affordable. And individual states often go in the opposite direction, cutting support to colleges and making it more expensive. This has especially been the case in some republican controlled states, most dramatically in Louisiana under Bobby Jindal and his successors. As you might have noticed in my first-day presentation, the cost of college in Louisiana has gone up over 100% in the past ten years, while in NJ it is up less than 20% in that time.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting film that might give you some sense of how the politics of higher education vary from state to state is Starving the Beast, which lays out the effects that state cuts to higher education are having not just on the cost of public college but its quality -- especially compared to private colleges. You can find it on Amazon (it used to be on Kanopy which is free to Rutgers students):
https://www.amazon.com/Starving-Beast-James-Carville/dp/B01N6XEK1Q/
You might also notice, as you work on the project, how our current privatized system of higher education under neoliberalism focuses only on individual approaches to making college more affordable, not systemic change that might make college more affordable for all.
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