Tedious FASFA forms, long lines with no end at the Financial Aid office, bills to pay at Fiscal Services, starving college students! All for what? To graduate and be in debt when you start working. College education should be provided by our nation at a low or free cost. Our nation has enough money to purchase expensive weapons and programs in the name of “National Defense” but not enough for free college entrance. Free college education should’ve been solved two hundred eighteen years ago. Our founding fathers supported it, but none more like Thomas Jefferson. The Zook and Carnegie Commission, on several occasions, supported low or no tuition for public two-year colleges.
An educated society would equal an advanced culture, Jefferson knew this and on 1786 Thomas Jefferson wrote to his old mentor, Chancellor Wythe, written from Paris:
“If all the sovereigns of Europe were to set themselves to work, to emancipate the minds of their subjects from their present ignorance and prejudices… a thousand years would not place them on that high ground, on which our common people are now setting out… I think by far the most important bill in our whole code, is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people…..Preach, my dear sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people” (Thomas Jefferson, 60).
“A crusade against ignorance!” that was the crusade upon which so many of the founding fathers embarked, but none more boldly or more hopefully than Jefferson. “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” (Thomas Jefferson, 69) he wrote to his friend Dr. Rush in eighteen hundred, and he kept his vow to the end. Jefferson wanted educate the common people and all to be maintained by the local government of the states. He had launched his own crusade against ignorance as early as 1779 when he introduced his three-part plan “to diffuse knowledge more generally through the mass of the people:” a system of elementary schools in every ward of the state, feeding into grammar schools, and eventually into a university.
None of this materialized at the time, but Jefferson was persistent. He was chairman of the committee which drafted the Land Ordinance of seventeen eighty five with its enlightened provisions establishing the policy of setting aside public lands for the support of schools and universities, a policy extended, eventually, to all the territories acquired by the United States. Jefferson knew what he was doing; he was an educated man, participated in the constitution, which is the oldest constitution still in effect in the world. He knew what was needed for the United States to prosper, and that was government paid institutions for the common people.
In 1947 the Zook Commission proposed that “tuition-free education should be available in public institutions to all youth for the freshman and sophomore years or for the traditional 2-year junior college course” (The President’s Commission, 1947, vol.1p.37). As mentioned earlier the Carnegie Commission supported low or no tuition for public two-year colleges, and relatively low tuition for lower-division students in four-year institutions. The concept of “two years of free access” to higher education in the United States has a long history, dating back to some of the first public junior colleges established in the early years of the last century.
The spread of the public junior college movement to practically all of the fifty states and the enormously rapid growth of enrollment in these public two-year institutions all testify to the increasing popularity of colleges that easy to enter and relatively low cost. We must not forget that most state universities and land-grant colleges have had a long tradition of very low or no tuition, from which some of them have departed over the last decades. Over the years tuition increases at four-year public institutions have become frequent, in the face of rising costs. Like the increase tuition here in UTSA scheduled for the spring of two thousand four.
Studies have shown over three hundred seventy seven million dollars was the estimated cost of national defense for the upcoming 2004 year, excluding war operations and covert ops. Just to give you an idea of the magnitude war operations cost, the Persian Gulf Regional defense fund was fifteen billion dollars (National Defense Budget). Why throw money away in ridiculously thermal nuclear devices, which we haven’t used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and not use those billions of dollars for our nation’s college youth?
World War II’s Atomic program was estimated at twenty billion dollars! It was also estimated that each bomb detonated cost around five billion dollars each (The Atomic Project, 15). Those bombs (as well as other national defense programs) could’ve paid tuitions fees for many American college students. We have many students with great potential, but they can’t nourish their talents because they have no way of paying for college, and if they do, they have to take out loans. Then over the years these loans get higher and higher due to the interest rates.
The federal government does a good job of paying these interest rates while college students are in college, but that’s not good enough. My friend in his first semester took out a two thousand dollar loan, plus a five thousand dollar college entrance loan, in total is seven thousand dollars. Now we take that seven thousand and multiply it by four (to graduate with a bachelors degree) and he will be in a twenty eight thousand dollar debt when graduates from college.
In addition to interest rates of the CAL loan at seven and one-half (which the federal government doesn’t cover) it will add one thousand five hundred to his already large debt. In order to help himself not to fall to much into debt he will work full-time to pay his food, rent, clothes, books etc. College is really expensive, and we need the government to intervene once again like it has done in the past. We the people have given it the right to help us provide water, gas, etc. Now we need the government to help us provide free or low college tuitions.
From the educated Thomas Jefferson to the modern American education commissions, they have made great points that college tuitions need to be addressed. Its within our power (we the people) since we are the government, we are the voters, we are the “American People” who can address this situation. It is our God given right to speak and address issues that need attention. Even though this seems like a hard task to accomplish our government has bright and educated people. They are sure to figure something out and make college tuitions low or free.
