Change Is Needed in College Funding, Admissions

With both federal and state funding for higher education being cut throughout the country, students are facing exponential increases in tuition costs, and millions of students are graduating from four-year colleges with a bachelor’s degree in one hand and a load of student debt in the other. Other prospective students are finding it impossible to even consider attending college because of the cost.

Beginning in the 1960s, this country experienced a revolution in higher learning. Students went to college in droves, encouraged by inexpensive tuitions, Depression-era parents who wanted more for their children, and a change in policy that opened the doors to colleges and universities to millions of poor and middle-class students that a decade ago would have been closed. And for a good thirty years, college has been an assumed goal for a high percentage of high school graduates.

No longer. The cost of a college education is becoming prohibitive for many students, and, especially among the top colleges and universities, both public and private, legacy admissions—the practice of admitting students based on their connection to alumni—are rejecting even the best students in favor of sons and daughters of generous alumni who make sizeable donations, even if the academic records of the children don’t warrant admission. The result is a college and university system that is increasing elitist while it leaves whole groups of young people behind.

We need to rededicate ourselves to higher education in this country, and make it easily available to everyone. Tuition needs to be affordable, financial assistance needs to be readily available, and college admissions need to be made based on academic qualifications, not genealogy or the deep pockets of a student’s parents. Otherwise we stand to recreate a caste system in this country that we supposedly had left far behind.