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Should College Tuition Be Free for All Students?

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Submitted By jrodr207
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Should College Tuition be Free for all Students?

I believe that most students today struggle to pay for college. Unless you are a 4.0 grade point average student with a complete scholarship to the university of your liking, you are subject to the same condition as the majority of college students that struggle to pay the tuition for a four year school or attend community college to transfer after two years. Despite the fact that I attend community college and call myself “financially stable” for the moment, but even with my mother’s income and with what I make myself, I am still not able to completely finance my way through college. I consider myself to be blessed as that does not even compare to what a student at a four year university has to pay for tuition; paying for tuition becomes even more burdensome if you are attending an out of state school or private university. Although financial aid tries to help students with their tuition with no expectation of being paid back, that money is generally insufficient in covering the majority of the debt. As a result, a “financially stable,” or lower status would still mean that you undertake debt that cannot be paid back in full for years to come. With that fact in mind, should college tuition be free for all students?

In order to fully answer this question, I began exploring different articles that offered different opinions as to what should be done to resolve this issue. “Free College, We can afford it” by Katrina vanden Heuvel of the Washington Post, details her perspective as to why college should be free and the benefits of affording it. In the article, she states that “[m]aking public colleges free would cost…30 billion a year.” (1) She believes that the government can afford it, because if Mitt Romney’s proposal “to eliminate the estate tax estate would cost about four times that sum and benefit only the

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