Higher Education Affordability
Brandon DeLoose
Baker College

Higher Education Affordability Earning a higher education yields a much larger total salary throughout life than those with a high school diploma or equivalent. However the cost of college has been increasing at a pretty ludicrous rate in the past thirty years in the United States. How are students to afford these ever skyrocketing costs to earn degrees and have the possibility of a more successful life? This problem begins in the history of higher education, therein are the causes that made the price inflate. This increase in cost makes it very difficult for people of low income to attain a degree of higher education. This in turn can have a lasting effect on the economy. Understanding all of this leads to two solutions. First, the government must take action to make this education more affordable, on way they might do this is by reducing their defense spending. Second, the people themselves can take steps to make higher education more affordable for themselves if they are in a situation where higher education is not very affordable to them. First we must first look at the history of higher education in the U.S. and the things going on around it at certain times that had some effects on it.
Higher Education in the U.S. really began in the colonial era. The first colleges were set up by religious groups to train ministers. These colleges were modeled after colleges like Cambridge and Oxford in England. Harvard being one of the first founded colleges in the U.S. was mostly financed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony but even in its early days it did collect some donations. After Harvard in 1636 came Yale in 1701 and later Princeton in 1747, and shortly after came Brown. Colleges were springing up left and right in the eighteenth century and they didn’t stop there. In the nineteenth century schools kept