Tuition: How to become impoverished 101

We all know that the cost of higher education continues to increase at an exponential rate. The problem is real and, not to sound apocalyptic, getting worse. Recently, as has already been reported, the state legislature failed to approve its proposed budget and ended up with a "doomsday" budget that shortchanges the University of Maryland College Park and many other institutions and government programs. Specifically, the doomsday measure includes a potential 10 percent (or greater) tuition increase.

If we are to maintain any semblance of the belief that this is a land of opportunity, how can we possibly ask the youngest in this society to bear the financial burden of our higher education system? We are, as a generation, going to spend decades attempting to repay tuition bills while becoming productive, cooperative, inquisitive supporters of our community. How can we compete with nearly every other Western nation — no, every other educated nation — when we can't even afford to educate ourselves?

I'm sure it need not be said, but no one else in the world pays tuition rates close to what we pay for our higher education. Balk as we may at the Scandinavian model, students there attend universities for free and are given a living stipend so that they do not have to work while in school. Admittedly, there are trade-offs such as higher taxes, but the truth is what happens here isn't so different. People take on $20,000 to $200,000 of debt. This is insanity. And worse, the likelihood of working in a job that never required any degree whatsoever becomes, increasingly, the norm.

Rachel Carstens, College Park

The writer is a graduate student at the University of Maryland College Park.