Research Proposal

Working Title: How are you Paying for College?

Topic
I will explore the different ways that students are paying for college now a days. I think I am going to survey a certain amount of students on how they pay for college. I think I want the survey to contain information from various students who do different things at Rutgers. Such as the athletes and see how they are paying as opposed to a non-athlete. I need to brainstorm a little more about the survey aspect of my project and see if it’s going to help me at all. I might have to come up with a more specific survey but I haven’t thought of it yet. I need to do more research from articles and books to see what they say. This will help me discover how many students receive help from the college to pay for their schooling. The surveying of students will help me see who is paying for college entirely by themselves, or with the help of their parents or not at all and their parents are taking care of the whole thing. My main interest in my research is how many parents are paying for college now a days? I want to know if more students are paying for college alone or if more students’ parents are still paying.

Research Question

How are students paying for college in today’s society? Are parents mostly paying for their children’s higher education? Or is it a group effort and both the student and the parents are sharing the payment?

Theoretical Frame

In the article, The parent trap: Paying for college vs. retirement, the topic of parents spending their money saved for their retirement on their kid’s college payments. This article talks about how parents are starting to save money for their children’s higher education when their children are as young as three years old. The price of college has just continued to rise. O over the years so starting that young might not even be as crazy as it sounds. I want to know if all parents do this though. Should the students be paying? This article also talks about how parents shouldn’t be using their retirement funds to pay for their child’s higher education. This article talks about how there are other ways besides using parent's saved retirement funds. “‘Because of the loss of home equity and the tighter credit market, families are eyeing their retirement funds for other uses,’ says Kent Allison, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers' financial education practice. But that, say financial planners, is not a good move because there are a number of ways to fund a college education, such as loans, scholarships and financial aid. Saving for retirement should be a bigger priority.” This author’s theory is that there are other ways for college to be paid for instead of solely by parents. So does this mean that most families are trying this theory of taking out loans and having their child help pay for their own education or are parents still trying to take on the payments by themselves? My theory is that it must depend on the family’s financial situation. I’m sure there are many families who can afford to pay for their child’s education but I also think that there are more families who cannot afford to do that. My theory is that it also has to do with how many children are in the family. If there are more kids in a family, the parents will most likely be less able to pay for their education. If there are two or less children in the family, maybe it is more possible to pay for it or to help their children pay for it. My theory is going to be assessed through both the articles and books I read and from the survey I come up with. My theory will be based off of the percentages of students whose parents pay for college or the other way around. I think I will have to make this survey very public in some way, maybe posting on the internet and around campus about it to get as much information as possible to make my theory as accurate as I possibly can.  



Research Plan, Case or Additional Questions

I plan on doing a lot of research from recent articles while also interviewing students. I think the interviewing part is very crucial to my topic. I am going to use three articles I found that greatly relate to my topic. The first one being The Parent Trap: Paying for College Vs. Retirement by Christine Dugas. This article really helps answer my question about just who is paying for college. There are also helpful tips and tools in this article to help parents spend less money on their children’s education by helping them receive scholarships and taking out loans. I will also be using an article entitled, Who Pays for College? by Janet Bodnar. This article is perfect for my research. My research question is the title of this article so it has great information and answers to my research question. The last article I found so far is called College Saving Plan: A Bad Gamble by Kevin Carey. This article goes along with the first paper I wrote about the risk of going to college and to pay so much money for a degree that might not make the student enough money. This also goes along with my question though because this article talks about whether spending so much money is worth it and who indeed is paying for the higher education.
I am also going to look into using some books I found at the library. I found them on the online search so I still have to go find them and see if they’re useful. I might just have to end up finding and using more articles since my topic is more of a recent issue that hasn’t really been written about in books yet.