How do Rutgers Students Pay for the Education?
I want to write my paper about the different ways that students are paying for their college education here at Rutgers. My idea is to interview around ten different people about the way they are paying for their college degree and the struggles that may come with that. I want to hear from real students who attend college and find out how they are dealing with the large cost of college. I want to see how many students are working while attending Rutgers and how many student's parents are helping them out with tuition and so on. I think this would help get an idea of how expensive college is and how many different types of people with different financial situations attend Rutgers. I think this research will help discover that more financial help is needed for students going to college. I would assume that even for the working class that this tuition is not a comfortable amount of money to be spending. For example, my roommate pays for her college education completely on her own. Her parents don't help her at all and therefore she gets financial aid. Without the financial aid, she would not be able to attend Rutgers because it is just so expensive. My experience for paying for college tuition includes taking out a lot of loans and working a job at school. I'm really interested in how everyone else is dealing with the burden of paying for college. So that's why I want to interview a variety of people to hear about their experiences and come to some type of conclusion about how the cost of college is affecting student's lives who attend Rutgers.
This is an interesting topic -- but rather than interviewing random students, you should really examine the statistical data and maybe talk to someone in the financial aid area at Rutgers. There is a lot of info out there. The research question I would be most interested in asking is, "Are students today more personally responsible for the cost of college than students in the past?" The easy answer is "yes," since privatization has meant cuts in state support. But what about parental support? What percentage of college are parents paying these days? How much are students themselves responsible for? There are related questions, such as how many students are claiming "emancipation" from "deadbeat parents" in order to get more financial aid? Has that number gone up?
ReplyDeleteI remember as an undergraduate that there was a common expectation that parents would foot the bill for students in college. The demographics have changed since then, and more students with less means (and with less well-off parents) are now going to college than they did back then. But it seems to me that today there is a general expectation that students should do most, if not all of it, on their own with loans. That may be part of why student debt burdens are going up so much.
Basically, privatization as an attitude change has not only led to less state support for students but less family support as well.
Check out this post regarding debt levels:
http://college201.blogspot.com/2012/09/degrees-of-debt-in-ny-times.html