[PRO GENERAL] Parish Forensics

_____. College tuition rates are so high they are approaching unaffordable Tamar Lewin, staff writer for The New York Times, in December 3, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/education/03college.html The rising cost of college even before the recession threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the biennial report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007 while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families. If we go on this way for another 25 years, we wont have an affordable system of higher education, said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center, a nonpartisan organization that promotes access to higher education.

____. The cost of higher education has risen more than 170 percent unnecessarily filtering out a lot of potential poor college hopefuls. Adolph Reed Jr. A GI Bill For Everybody professor of political science on the Graduate Faculty of Social and Political Science at the New School for Social Research, a member of the Interim National Council of the Labor e Fall 2001. Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating during the 1980s, costs of attending colleges and universities rose nationally, and sources of federal grant-in-aid support decreased relative to need. Aggregate tuition and fees at all kinds of institutions of higher education (private and public) rose from slightly more than $5 billion in 1970 to more than $55 billion in 1996. When adjusted for inflation, this amounts to a 170 percent increase, which was nearly two and a half times greater than the rate of growth in aggregate enrollments over that period (while real wages remained flat, or even declined, during that time). Meanwhile, in 1970 federal grants covered only 2.7 percent of total tuition and fees, but that was at a point when such costs, especially for in-state students at public institutions, were generally low and more easily manageable. By 1980, increasing concerns about rising costs had prompted increased government aid-covering more than 23 percent of tuition and fees nationally, though this increase hardly kept pace with increased costs. By 1996, such grants had declined and covered less than 12 percent of total tuition and fees. This retrenchment was partly the result of intentional rightist strategies to rein in what was perceived as a source of "adversarial culture" in universities and an expression of the corporate-led attack on social wage benefits of all sorts that might weaken labor discipline.Increasingly, college attendance for all except the wealthy has become contingent on qualification for interest-carrying student loans. This filters out many potential students who either cannot afford the encumbrance of loan indebtedness or cannot qualify for loans. More students are prevented from completing degree programs because they exhaust the sums for which they qualify before satisfying the requirements. Still more take much longer to complete their courses of study than they otherwise would because they have to take off time to work. Still more are pressured by their debt burdens to pursue courses of study, or even subsequent lines of employment, outside their interests in hopes of earning enough to pay off their loans.