I, for one, think that our educational system needs to be revamped almost completely. There are definitely a broad range of reasons Ungar gives in his essay backing up studying and receiving a degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences. Ungar acknowledges that a degree in the Liberal Arts is ‘a luxury that most families can no longer afford.’ (191) He then uses the rest of his essay to persuade you of the many reasons that this is not the case. I agree that having a degree in the Liberal Arts is a ‘luxury’ for many Americans nowadays because my experience as a current college student confirms it. Only I think of the ‘luxury’ as being able to step into and attend college classes daily.
Many people have witnessed the cost of rising college tuitions crush students dreams of attending the schools that they have been fantasizing about for years. Tuition for colleges has been rising for many years and it is going to keep rising. This is the reason many American’s are not even considering college. Entering in a society without education is very hard when most jobs require at least an associates degree. With the rising tuition education is going to be very hard to acquire.
Rising of college prices is unfair because student debt increases, the annual dropout rate increases, and higher anxiety and stress levels. College prices are increasing and there are some things that are causing them to increase. For example, “Some analysts attribute the rise in tuition rates to increase in demand for college education, as more young people come to believe that they need at least a bachelor’s degree in order to achieve their career goals and increase potential earnings” (College). The rise in tuition rates is because students are starting to see what they need in the future to achieve what they want for their future. They will need a college education to get the job they want and to make the earnings that they want as well.
There are many factors that contribute as to why students are in need for student loans and credit cards. One important factor is school. It's becoming expensive and in a recent study done by the College Board, it is stated that the escalating cost of school has risen its highest than in all the years since they started recording the cost of education. Because attending school isn't an option, a lot of students look toward student loans and opening credit cards to help pay off their tuition, books, and living expenses. An article on student loans on USNews.com states that, “Although the federal government will hand out billions of dollars more in college grants in 2011 and 2012 than ever before, the nation's financial aid programs as a whole are not keeping up with rising tuition, government officials and financial aid analysts say”.
Critical Thinking in My Daily Life Critical thinking is an ordinary occurrence in my everyday life. Being that I am a full time student putting myself through college, finding ways to save money and budget properly are ways I get to use my critical thinking skills often. Budget planning can include simple tasks like planning my grocery trips by making lists of only necessities, and weighing the pros and cons of going out or staying in on the weekends. I’ve also been faced with larger decisions when budgeting in the last year. When reviewing my monthly expenses, I realized I could save a significant amount of money by cancelling my cable and joining Netflix and watching movies online.
The anticipation of shopping for what you desire and not having to pay the bill right away is used to entice many of us. Every day college students are being supplied with credit cards for the simple fact that they are new teenagers about to start college. The following will affirm the hazards of credit cards being provided to college students. Imagine being 30 years old and still paying a pair off a pair of jeans you bought back in college. I’m sure it sounds ridiculous, but this is a scenario credit card debt can create.
There are other ways to be an individual and express yourself besides your clothing, but it does play a big role in showing others what you are like and finding out who you want to be. Clothes are an expression of who we are, and at a young age, it's important to develop confidence and self - expression. The promoting of school uniforms has prevented students from free expression. Kids are trapped in these uniforms like cages. They are unable to search for their own identity, because it has pretty much been taken away from them.
As if the current prices weren’t bad enough on today’s students, according to the College Board’s annual report there is an annual jump of almost 10% in the cost of tuition at public universities (College Game). This increase may not seem like much at first, but add up the increases over the four or five year time span it takes to earn a degree and tuition will have risen roughly $1000 by the last year of school. This constant increase in college education is making it hard for many to attend college due to costs. The increasing cost of higher education leads students to have an increase in debt after graduation. Everyone in this room is enrolled in the University of Georgia.
What Does the Research Say? Reason for Bigger Classes Class sizes are continually getting larger and larger with every passing school year. A pressure for the change in class sizes come through the institutions financial stability. Higher education is at the mercy of the country’s economy, with the economy not at its prime, schools are struggling to afford the needs of the institution. These schools are looking for anything to cut back on costs, “budget constraints are creating a climate of cost containment, within which larger class sizes may be seen as an alluringly quick and convenient cost-cutting strategy” (Chapman & Ludlow, 2010, p. 105-106).
To begin with, every one of us agreed that we can find more information if we ask people from both universities to complete a survey. Hence, for our second meeting we had to came up with ten interesting questions about our main topics: assessment criteria, financial aspects and the relationship between students and lecturers/ tutors. Coming back to Romania for our Christmas Holiday was the perfect opportunity to share our questionnaire with our colleagues. We asked them to answer all of the questions, but at the end of the day we noticed that collecting the data was too difficult. This is why we transformed our questionnaire in an online survey.