Let’s think about a college education as a business transaction, so we have a consumer who is much in debt, and the price of the product is just increasing sans bounds. It is not a very sustainable transaction in the long-term, and there will be an evolution of some sort in the field of education. Another reason, to which I attribute the rising cost of colleges are the increase of Administrative Staff, staff who will never teach a student. There has been more than a 250 percent increase in the administrative staff hired by colleges since 1978 than faculty whose increase is a mere 55 percent. There is also merit to the notion of questioning that am I buying higher quality education? Apparently not. Where I come from, there is a saying-‘Customer king’, now following that train of thought. It is a logical assumption that universities now also seek to make their customers happy, and it is horrifying for me to admit, but I feel inclined to take the ‘Easy A’ courses but at the end of the day I want to ask myself — ‘Have I learnt something or is this just for my GPA?’ I think asking this question is fundamental to having a college education.

I think colleges and universities are at an impasse. Due to the runaway cost inflation of education, this is not what a student or the parents have signed up for; I think this has made people question the objective of a college education; the moral high ground that these institutions stand on and whether is it a sound investment? At the start of 2013, Moody’s changed the outlook on the American Higher Education to negative so while considering the high cost of education mainly questioning is it worth it?

Colleges tend to talk about education and how it’s non-financial and a noble pursuit that is an excellent idea, but not when student have to take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

What is the solution to higher tuition costs?

The rising cost of higher education has helped in the creation of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) that challenge the conventional form of education and has got me curious about it. Now, with the Internet, we have such vast amounts of information and knowledge available to us, and this might pose a challenge to the conventional method to go about a college education. Startups in the Silicon Valley like Udacity and Coursera, which offer college courses. San Jose State University tried using Udacity courses for college credit with their first-year students, and the results were astounding. They showed the highest pass rate of just 50 percent. The students in a feedback survey said that they didn’t know where exactly they went wrong while trying to approach a problem, and a lot of the materials was just vague. A simple analogy would be that you can take a horse to pond, but you cannot make it drink the water. Online courses still haven’t been able to provide the personal touch of a professor or TA. Frankly, I am not sure about how teaching will change in the future but I know it will be fueled by hope and unyielding optimism that all students have about their future, they may not know what exactly they want to do but they know that they wish to live the American Dream.