Education: not a right, not affordable but you are free to pursue it

 

It is often said that knowledge is power, but the price of knowledge is rarely ever mentioned. We are told from an early age to pursue higher education to be successful in life but we are never told what it will cost us. In today's society, a piece of paper dictates whether you are qualified or not to perform a job. This piece of paper costs four or more years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Education is not cheap and it's not getting any better. Private institutions, to some degree, have the ability to set and increase their prices based on "high standards", but public institutions have also been increasing their tuitions rates with little to no improvement at all. Without educated people there would be no progress, no inventions, no improvement in our economy, so why are we inadvertently discouraging individuals from getting an education? Why is education not a human right or in the very least, why isn't it affordable?

The constitution of the United States does not mention education and the supreme court has refused to recognize any right to a taxpayer-funded education. K-12 schools are government-funded and "free" to the public, so why can't higher education be also government-funded since the money comes from taxpayers? Why aren't the people free to decide how our tax money is used and distributed to fund free college education? The truth of the matter is that we are at the mercy of our government representatives and higher education is considered by them as a business rather than a public service as it should be. We cannot ignore that the government provides federal and state grants, but this money is limited to income restrictions, so it isn't really free money. In other words, you must have a low income to receive federal school grants that in most cases will not pay for your entire tuition and force you to take student loans. Education is not only not a right, but it is not properly regulated as a business by the government either.

Even if we consider inflation when looking at the rising cost of education, the numbers are ridiculous. Within the past four decades, the cost of undergraduate degrees has risen at a rate of over 200% at public schools and over 100% at private schools. On the other hand, the federal minimum wage in 1980 was $3.10 and today is $7.25, and we are not including the increase in the cost of living. How does the rise in tuition rates make any sense, and why has the government done nothing to regulate the rising cost of education? It isn't just a business; it is a predatory industry. In the United States, there are over 45 million people with a collective student debt of nearly 1.6 trillion dollars making student loans the second highest consumer debt to date. We live in a free-market economy where competition is part of the game, and government regulation should be minimal but instead, it seems to be non-existent at all. In this business industry, competition appears to not include adequate pricing and without a price ceiling, people are being drained of money to be able to enter a competitive job market with no guarantee of success. We are free to pursue an education that most of us can't afford, so what does freedom do for us? We are free to pick the school we want to attend and the amount of debt we want to get into with the hopes of a better life.

 In conclusion, education is not a right because our founding fathers did not think about it that way, but that does not mean we can't amend the constitution. Unfortunately, higher education is a business that we are in more than one way forced to partake in since earning a living wage requires you to have a piece of paper that qualifies you to do a job. As a business, it is poorly regulated by the government that even a minimum wage job cannot pay the monthly average tuition in the most affordable community college without grants or loans to make up the difference. We live in America, a free-market economy, the land of free where we are bound to pay the outrageous price of getting an education.