On Financing College Tuition
On Friday, Oct. 23, South African president Jacob Zuma gave in to the demands of student to freeze tuition fees for South Africa’s public universities in 2016. Zuma’s announcement came after weeks of protest by students who flooded to the capitol building in Pretoria by the thousand. Before these protests, nicknamed the ‘fees must fall’ protests, the planned tuition increase for 2016 was 11.5 percent. Zuma commented on his decision, saying that “[the] government understands the difficulty faced by students from poor households and urges all affected to allow the process to unfold to find long-term solutions in order to ensure access to education by all students.” Zuma mentions very little on the topic beyond this, but in this quote he does point out the struggle poor families faced sending their children to college.
South Africa is an incredibly inequitable society. Its socioeconomic classes face incredible disparities, and race and this wage inequality are undoubtedly related. National statistics from 2014 show, as relayed by CNN reporters Basani Baloyi and Gilad Isaac, “on average, the top 10 percent of wage earners take home 90 times more in wages than bottom 10 percent, the top one percent earn 393 times the bottom 10 percent.” In addition, more than 60 percent of working blacks make less than 300 dollars per month, putting them well below the poverty line in South Africa. The average tuition cost in South Africa ranges between $2,400 and $3,500 per year of undergraduate education, making the cost unattainable to an outstanding number of South Africans, mostly the black community.
With the beginnings of tuition reform in South Africa as a direct result of student driven protests, it stirs the question of what’s next for the education reform in the U.S. that most presidential hopefuls admit we need, yet tend to dance around. Tuition prices in the United States are absurdly high and have been rising rapidly even in past decade. In-state public university students pay an average of $9,139 a year in tuition and fees, which has been affected by an insane 30 percent increase in the past ten years. Nonresidential students at public universities pay an average of $22,958, and most private universities have students pay upward of $50,000.
Many politicians agree we need education reform in some capacity, but nobody has a clear, affordable plan that will even begin to tackle the massive web that is the American college education system. One of the undiscussed problems I see with the college system in the U.S. is the financial aid and how it often leaves out middle class Americans. Either you’re part of an extremely poor family and qualify for a certain amount of financial aid that might be too insignificant to fund college tuition, or you’re grouped into the demographic of people who are wealthy enough to pay for the entirety of a college education, which can often add up to $250,000. What many school’s financial aid systems do not take into account is the burden that is placed on middle class families who technically fall into this category of families who can afford to pay full tuition. Although many middle class families fall on paper into the ambiguous category of people able to pay full tuition, they often struggle to make ends meet when it comes to paying the incredible sum of money for a four year college education without help.
NYU, for example, is one of the most expensive universities in the United States, costing almost $66,000 per year, a whopping $264,000 for a four year undergraduate education. NYU also happens to be the worst school for financial aid in the country. The financial aid system at most schools groups people into strict brackets, grouping all incomes above $80,000 into one category. This is incredibly unfair to middle class families who make marginally above this line of income and are still forced into the same category of upper class households who make hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. This is why the college tuition and financial aid system fundamentally excludes and is biased against middle class americans—even though your household may qualify on paper to be in the income bracket ‘above $80,000 per year,’ paying $200,000 for each child’s education is an extreme financial burden, whether or not the college financial aid system wants to address it.