An education, particularly a college education, is the key to getting ahead in this country. In today's economy, a college degree has overtaken the high-school diploma as the minimum requirement for the workforce. But college is becoming ever more expensive -- in much of the country you can buy a house for what it costs to attend an Ivy League university -- and it's harder and harder for middle-class parents to afford. Schools themselves have to control their costs to avoid pricing the middle class out of the market. Government also needs to make sure that college is available to all students who want an education, by providing tax credits for tuition expenses and expanding all forms of financial aid.
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There's no doubt that higher education represents a ladder out of poverty; the problem is that the poor and minorities have trouble reaching the first rung. Poor and minority families often have trouble raising the money to send their children to college, and even when they do, these students often aren't prepared for the rigors of college because they attended failing high schools. If, as a society, we're serious about giving people a chance to get out of poverty, we need to focus our higher education resources on the people who need it most. We must give them every opportunity to succeed. That means financial aid should be based on need only and colleges should factor socioeconomic status and race into their admissions decisions. Colleges should also provide remedial help to students who need it: You can't shut people out of the American dream because they were unlucky enough to attend a bad high school.
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The reason so many families struggle to send their kids to college is simple: tuition keeps going up, outpacing both inflation and family income. Colleges have to take responsibility for prices that go up so far, so fast, and the best way to solve the problem is for colleges to become more efficient and competitive. Colleges need to make better use of new techniques like distance learning to reach more students at lower cost. For-profit educational institutions are experimenting with new ways of teaching and should be encouraged -- if nothing else, the competition will keep colleges sharp. We also need stronger accountability for public universities and community colleges. Unlike the K-12 education system, there aren't many yardsticks for measuring the quality of a college education and few ways of knowing whether taxpayers and students are getting what they pay for.
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