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project ideas

1.)  wear a fat suit and see how people treat you=> documentary

2.)  ride around in a wheelchair for a day and see what it's like=> documentary

3.)something with sports=> a mode I've never tried before

I'm pretty interested in the first and second one.  i just think it would be fun to go around in someone else's shoes for a day and see what its like.  this project would require at least 4 people in it.

paper 3

Collin Lisi

ENG 111

Do We Get The Bang For Our Buck?

One thing that has always worries a family the second they have a kid is the cost of college tuition.  Most families have to start saving the second their child is born or even before.  Paying for college was a difficult thing for me personally.  My family believes that you should personally have to pay for your own college because your parents got you through your first 18 years.  I had a really rough time balancing work, sports, and school.  Then one day while I was thinking about how I’m supposed to come up with thousands and thousands of dollars a year I thought why is college so expensive?  I feel like people never really think about that because they are too busy trying to come up with ways to pay for it.  From there on I made my goal to figure out why things are the way they are and if they could change for the better.

            There are many kids that go in with student loans and don’t realize the debt they will be in once they get out of school.  Student loans are one of the worst things that can happen to you. This is all because most people right out of college are looking for a job and usually don’t have very much money. From 1982 till 2002 the amount of money in loans on average that a full time student has to take out has tripled.  These huge loans are troubling kids the second they get out of college.  Senior democrats in the senate Kennedy and Miller have come up with some solutions to this problem. The two have different but similar plans. Kennedy wants to raise the Pell Grant to 4,500 dollars and change the loan forgiveness to 15,000 dollars.  Miller wants the Pell Grant to be 11,600 and the loan forgiveness to be 17,500. The real difference between the two plans is that Kennedy’s would happen right away, but wouldn’t be as big of a help.  Millers plan will take a year to come into effect but will be a more significant help in financial aid.

            Compared to most schools Miami is a reasonably priced school. The tuitions for in state students is 12,198 a year which is a little more costly than other Ohio schools like Ohio State which is only about 9,582 a year. The reason most people think the cost of college is going up is either over paid administrators or the building of unnecessary additions to the campus such as hot tubs or massage rooms.  A recent poll show that dozens of administrators at state schools are making 500,000 or more a year.   The administrators and the people that support them responded by saying that to get a top quality staff you have to pay top dollar.

            Another reason for why tuition is increasing so drastically is the student teacher ratio.   Before classrooms would have hundreds of students in these great lecture halls.  More recently it has been proven that most students work better when they can get more time with the teacher.  So colleges have been competing to get their student teacher ratio down because it is now one of the most important things people look for when choosing a college.  The only way to lower that ratio is to hire more teachers.  College professors are not just regularly paid teachers.  A complaint was that most professors teach for an average of 11 hours a week and get paid almost twice as much as a public school teacher.  Their salaries a significantly higher than an average teacher because of the research projects they perform on the side.  At Miami just about all the professors have at least one research project they are working on and with permission students can help.  So you really end up paying for yourself if you take the opportunities that are given to you.

            The government has gone so far as to say they should punish the colleges for raising the tuition above the inflation rate.  The plan is to keep colleges from raising their tuition over College Affordability Index, but if they do they have to appear in front of the US education Department and explain why and how they can keep the cost down in the future.  The thing is college is not like a store.  If you are a popular college you are not going to have to worry about losing enrollment because the price goes up. For example if Harvard raises their tuition by few thousand dollars their enrollment will stay the same because of how popular it is.  Colleges have no pressure to keep their costs down so it is extremely necessary to have the government threaten them with the loss of federal aid.

            Colleges are supposedly trying to cut cost which would make you think that the cost of tuition would go down, but somehow it’s still rising every year.  Murray State University President Alexander says that over the last three years they have cut back things such as eliminate professor and administrator positions, limited heating and cooling upgrades, and reduced the number of classes.  Two year colleges are on the rise because of the cost of tuition.  Many schools have classes at all hours and even on weekends.  The biggest benefit is that the price is extremely low.  Recently a lot of kids have started taking colleges courses in high school at community colleges.  The best part is they pay nothing for it accept for their high school fees.  Gov. Mark Warner wants to create a special senior program.  The program has two separate parts. One is for students who don’t plan on going to college. There will be special trade classes the can attend which relate directly to what their jobs will be.  The other program will give students who plan on going to college the opportunity to earn a semester of college credit their senior year. Doing this would save the family up to about 5,000 dollars.

            In conclusion to all this I think the government should get involved with the high cost of college.  If our country wants its future to better it is going to need smart educated people to do so. There are a lot of cases where the reason kids don’t seek a higher education is because money is a problem.  A handful of those kids try to make it work by getting multiple jobs and trying to balance school on top of that.  Very few make it in this situation.  Most end up having to drop out because it’s too much.  College should be viewed as something that people are supposed to do not just another option.  I believe that in order to have a strong country you must have strong and intelligent people making it go round. 

Sources

108th Congress, First Session, H.R. 3311, the Affordability in Education Act of 2003; http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov.

108th Congress, First Session, HR 3180, College Opportunity for All Act; http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov.

Address to 2003 annual meeting of the American Educational Finance Association; www.ilr.cornell.edu/cheri/wp/cheri_wp32.pdf.

Greg Winter, “Jacuzzi U? A Battle of Perks to Lure Students,” The New York Times, Oct. 5, 2003, p. A1.

Lori Montgomery and Amy Argetsinger, “Ehrlich Says He May Seek Tuition Cap At Colleges,” The Washington Post, Oct. 31, 2003, p. B1.

Quoted in Sara Hebel, “The Future of Tuition,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 19, 2003, p. A10.

“Straight Talk About College Costs and Prices: The Final Report and Supplemental Material from the National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education,” American Council on Education/Oryx Press, 1998; www.acenet.edu/washington/college_costs/1998/07july/straight_talk.html.