Nowadays, university students are becoming consumers to the new market created by universities. This being, the educational market were the college presidents become CEOs and try to maximize their profit by increasing tuitions and student loans.  How has this happened? Well it is due to cases such as in Cooper Union were the president Jamshed Bharucha made risky investments (using $200m from their loan) on hedge funds that suffered loses and even after suffering these losses, he continued on investing to create a new engineering building. Hence, the university started forcing its students to pay half of the tuition ($20,000) in order to gain revenue and be able to pay its loans. Before this, education was free as long as students showed they had the potential and grades to be the best.

The article clearly explains the consequences of cases such as this: university years should be about soul searching, learning new knowledge, etc. Contrary to this, now students are studying and going to their classes so that they don’t waste money, instead of going because of the passion of studying what they like. Furthermore, they dislike the managements that are not helping them against this unfairness. This problem has grown so much in the past years that student debt has surpassed $1tn in the USA.

I believe that money should never be a constraint to stop someone from going to university or school; as long as they should they are capable of doing and show the determination. This is not an unlikely concept as countries like Brazil, Sri Lanka, as well as France, Italy and Malta (for Europeans) offer free education. Plus by offering education to its citizens they will be able to later generate money for the government or, if they work abroad, increase the recognition of their country. So at the end of the day, giving free education doesn’t mean that the government is going to lose money; they are investing it on their citizens. As my parents tell me: the payments for my education aren’t a waste of money, they are an investment on my future.

References:

The harsh truth: US colleges are businesses, and student loans pay the bills | Money | The Guardian. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/oct/07/colleges-ceos-cooper-union-ivory-tower-tuition-student-loan-debt