My name is John Hatton and I am a proud resident of St. Catherine/St. Monica Hall at Gonzaga University. I am a freshman in the undergraduate program here.
I am writing to ask that you do something to make college tuition more affordable. Roughly thirty years ago, the average cost of tuition per year at a 4-year institution was $10,385, the equivalent of a $4,406 value in today’s dollars. Since then, it has grown to $35,074. Over 4 years, that $4,406 would’ve cost just over seventeen thousand dollars, less than half of what one year of tuition today costs. Without a doubt, there is a very noticeable problem with the price of tuition today. As a college student, I feel the pain of this drastic increase and I also feel pain for the other 17,487,475 students enrolled in colleges across the United States. If you were to calculate the cost of putting all 17,487,475 of us through 4 years of college, it would cost $3.082 x 10^11 thirty years ago and $2.453 x 10^12 today. That is an increase of $2,144,800,000,000 in college tuition, and that money isn’t coming out of thin air. It is coming from savings we had worked hard to earn, and we are creating student debt that we cannot pay off on average until 11 years after we have graduated college, given we all are able to get stable jobs in a world where nearly half of us cannot find work and end up working for minimum wage as waiters, janitors, and sales clerks. It’s a little ridiculous for college to be so expensive now, don’t you think?
So this question is for you: How do you, as Secretary of Education, help create an education system that doesn’t leave us in debt? How do you make it so that your education system doesn’t have a success rate below 50%? How do you get America Back on track with an Education system people want to be a part of?
I hope you take this into consideration and please send me a response letting me know if you are ready to make it easier for students to afford college.
Thank you for your time and for considering my request.
Sincerely,
John Hatton