TAMPA, FL — College attendees have become history’s new proletariat—their famous hammers and sickles now traded for exorbitantly priced text books and greasy spatulas. The students of America, who’ve only just left home to attend college, are already encompassed in a debt that will negatively influence their lives until they are middle aged. The fundamental issues of capitalism that have inhibited human growth and wellbeing since its enactment have pervaded our once most progressive institutions—our universities—and are bringing about this lower class, the likeness of which has not existed before. It is a class which exists only in the context of a single generation.
The unfortunate truth is that universities are run like businesses, with their ultimate aim to cultivate the most prestigious reputation and procure the most funds, not to offer the highest quality education to their students. Competition between colleges paired with these objectives causes students to be overlooked and abused, as business-like establishments operate for the accumulation of profit above all else, and will continue to raise tuition and increase their profit margins at the cost of their students for as long as they are allowed, or until their standing significantly suffers.
Despite this exploitation, students cannot simply refuse to attend universities without jeopardizing their futures. College education has become a necessity in modern America as jobs offering high enough salaries to feasibly sustain a person in our culture become less in number and extremely high in demand. It is the nature of capitalism that necessities be made extortionately priced, coveted commodities with consumers unable to refuse to patronize the purveyor of this good.
The universities will not naturally restrict themselves—regulation must be instituted to protect the education of the students of America, and, subsequently, the future of American society. The statistics exemplify this issue of necessity vs. price: although there have been small declines in college enrollment recently, overall undergraduate enrollment is projected to increase to 19.6 million by 2024, while 69% of public four-year college graduates exited college in debt with an average debt of $28,950 per borrower in 2014. Meanwhile, tuition has reached a record high, costing on average $22,958 per year for out-of-state public four-year college attendees in 2015. Our educational system will remain locked in this detrimental trend unless actions are taken to undermine the existing processes of these powerful institutions.
Our youth are sent to universities to flourish and become empowered—to better their futures and that of the world with the experience and knowledge they will hopefully gain. But the nature of poverty is that the poor’s conceptions be confined to immediate necessities, like the allocation of food, money, and utilities, with little else allowed to breach consciousness.
This contradicts the entire purpose of education. Students cannot learn in our current cultural climate, yet our universities become increasingly expensive with every year. We have stunted the intellectuals of our era; we must now collectively rescind our current state before the damages wreaked are irreparable.
