A group of students at the University of California, Riverside have proposed a plan to put themselves through college while avoiding massive student loans: students would pay their tuition after graduation by giving up 5 percent of their annual income over a twenty-year period.
While their plan is certainly intriguing and offers incentive to enter lower-paying professions like teaching or public service, the responsibility should not lie on students to develop new plans to pay for the exorbitant and ever-rising cost of post-secondary education—university administrations and our elected officials should be doing more to help. Their inaction on this issue threatens to make college a luxury for the few, instead of accessible for the many.
In a country where it is almost imperative to hold a bachelor’s, if not a postgraduate, degree to find a good job, it is also imperative that something be done to curb the rising cost of tuition and make higher education truly accessible to all. State and federal governments are not making this task easy—California cut funding to the UC system by $650 million last year alone. To make up for these losses, tuition increased by 18 percent this year. Sadly, this phenomenon is hardly unique to the Golden State. Students everywhere struggle with paying for an education they must obtain, which promulgates a vicious cycle of debt.
Getting an education at an American university should not bankrupt students. With an astronomical unemployment rate for recent graduates and few options for those who forgo college, students are trapped. For some, college is simply not an option, when even in-state tuition rates are too big a financial burden for many families to bear. College is becoming again an elite pursuit, instead of an option for all hard-working Americans to achieve the means of building a better life.
We need Congress, state legislatures, and universities across the country to take a stand on student loans and the rising cost of college, instead of passing the buck until it finally lands in the laps of students. What’s at stake is not just a college degree, but the basic American promise of access to higher education for all who earn it.
