How Government Affects Public Universities

Words: 1143
Pages: 5

Jacob Lowry

Suzanne Levy

11/7/15

How The Government Directly Affects Public Universities

Unless you have recently received an inheritance, every college student dreads paying for their tuition which raises the question, why is college tuition so expensive? Since 1980, the average tuition for both private and public schools has quadrupled to almost $9,500 a semester. Although there is an increased price of tuition, the percentage degrees that are being used is down to 27%. High tuition prices can scare prospective college students into staying away from college because they believe that they are better off staying away from debt and an, “useless” degree. The debt that is left after college withholds graduates from buying cars, getting
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Another and possibly the strongest way to attract prospects was the head coach and coaching staff of there teams and some of the biggest names such as Urban Meyer gets paid over five million dollars a season and this is a large price for these colleges to pay. The government often wants universities to research medical issues or science and it is funded but their time and effort is focused on the research and not on the academics which forces the administration to increase the size of the staff or department and this is not funded. Good sport programs and ground-breaking research creates media …show more content…
The most of this $2,200 increase occurred in the fall of 2010, where states such as Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana rose their tuition prices by over $1,000. In Paul Campos’s article in the New York Times discusses the tuition and inflation and how it affects public institutions, “public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general ” (Paragraph three). From 2000 to 2008, the amount of aid from the national government for each student has decreased because the funding for financial aid has not kept up with inflation and resources going elsewhere. During the first two years of the recession (2000-2002), $1,000 of public funding had been lost and this dropped enrollment by over .5% nationally. The students’ reaction to this increase was to go to community colleges for the first two years for a four year degree and transfer over to a bigger