Financial Aid Raises Tuition Costs
Is federal financial aid raising your tuition costs?!Yes, says Neal McClusky, the associate director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, a free market think-tank for education experts. McClusky believes that the more the government gives to student aid programs (in both loans and grants) the more colleges can demand in tuition. On average, colleges and universities raised their sticker prices 6%, says the College Board.
In other words, McClusky claims that government student aid and tuition costs are running around in a circle: that as Governments offer more aid to help out students with college costs, schools increase tuition accordingly to get even more money.
So what’s your suggestion, McSmarty? Government should butt out, duh! McClusky’s alternative is to cut government spending to force colleges to be more competitive and lower tuition. Ah… free market economics at its finest.
Hmmm… Does this make any sense? Call us left-wing radicals if you want to, but we’re not convinced you can treat the cost of a higher education according to free market principles. Works great for shoes, but horribly for education. Inspiring professors, original research, and state-of-the-art facilities all cost money. Pitting colleges against one another in a pissing contest of lowest-advertised tuition or BOGO degrees does not necessarily benefit students.
Not to mention that in a job market skimpier than Lindsay Lohan’s short-shorts, students need a higher education to get a job… even if the first 10 years’ salary go to paying back that that tuition. At a certain point, students and their parents will pay any price in order to earn that degree. Haven’t we seen this already? What middle-class family can really afford 40,000 a year in tuition? And yet so many scrimp, save, and borrow on their mortgage in order to afford it. The point being, free market principles really only work if the market is free. There really is no incentive for colleges to lower tuition on their own, since students are bound to have to pay, regardless of the price tag.
So what do you think? Will “market forces” take care of tuition inflation? Is the government really just screwing us over by helping us out? Twitter us with #tuition to let us know what you think or leave a comment below to join the growing debate about raising tuition costs and federal financial aid.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 1:23 pm and is filed under College Grants, College Tuition, FAFSA, Financial Aid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 10th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
Here’s a thought. If colleges keep raising tuition because the government keeps offering more to help students (and I know because this just happened to me), then maybe the government should step in and say that there has to be a limit on how much a school can charge.