Getting education and developing processional skills is a crucial process that defines one’s ability to work within the set target market. However, due to the increasingly high fees, higher education has become a nearly impossible goal to pursue for a range of learners. Leading to major negative outcomes, which range from a major delay in gaining the ability to work in the chosen field to a crushing debt that causes a student to develop major financial complications, college costs have been spinning out of proportions lately, making a tremendously negative impact both on students and the environment of higher education, in general. Due to the vastly negative outcomes of college costs increase, higher education may become obsolete, creating a stupendous crisis in the academic setting.
Literature Review: Student Loan and Student debt
The phenomenon of the student loan is quite simple as a concept. Specifically, a student loan suggests borrowing money from a bank in order to pay the tuition fees (Nissen et al. 248). However, despite the simplicity of the concept, the outcomes that it entails for most students, particularly, in terms of the necessity to return the loan to the bank after completing the education, suggests placing oneself in a rather strenuous situation.
Namely, given the rigid conditions of the agreement signed to withdraw a loan, a student must find a job immediately after completing education, which almost always cancels the opportunity to work in the desired field and, instead, suggests that a student must settle of a low-paying job in an entirely different field, typically , in the service industry (Nissen et al. 251). Therefore, while offering a temporary solution to the issues that one is likely to face when trying to gain professional skill, higher education also implies tremendous fees and a substantial dent.
In fact, student loan leading to college debt is a very common situation that contributes significantly to an increased rate of dropout cases. Implying that a student recognizes the inability to pay the loan back to the bank in the future and preferring to quit higher education instead, the phenomenon of a college dropout has become quite common in the U.S. (Hartlep et al. 6). Moreover, the economically and financially devastating effect that college debt has on students is believed to be one of the main causes of the future crisis of higher education (Ulbrich and Kirk 191).
For instance, Popescu (115) warns that, if left unmanaged, the ever-increasing student loan I likely to cause an educational crisis: “Numerous students who start college do not meet the expense of completing their degrees.” Moreover, studies show that the debts, which students amass while completing their higher education, make learners prioritize managing finances over learning, which reduces the quality of education significantly (Nissen et al. 252). Therefore, the issue of a college loan and the resulting college debt must be addressed not only by students shaping their financial management techniques but also on the statewide institutional level by developing a policy that will help students to reduce the financial pressure and that will make higher education more affordable.
Solution
Considering the proposed tool for managing the situation will reveal that the target audiences and observers, the issue of tuition costs and the associated concerns becomes a rather serious problem that needs to be managed accordingly in the nearest future. In order to change the situation completely and help the target population to recover from the damage produced by the observed unfairness, short-term solutions re unlikely to be applicable to the situation. Therefore, one might want to consider the options such as increasing the support offered to a student, thus providing the student with the information and skills needed to seek employment opportunities independently.
When managing a situation of high tuition costs, one should question the reasonability he increasingly high tuition costs and consider other opportunities for gaining the require skills and abilities. Indeed, due to the rise in the role of innovative technology and the existing social media network as the possible source of the necessary information. Indeed, a closer look at the current range of education opportunities and gaining knowledge and skills in a specific area will demonstrate that a range courses and platforms that offer the courses in question at a reasonable prices exist (Hartlep et al. 7).
Therefore, when knowing what one wants to undertake and which areas one wishes to explore in order to develop the required career, one could embrace the opportunities that self-guided and self-directed education offers as opposed to the one that the current higher education system provides.
Another solution that does not seem as radical and still allows one to remain a part of the higher education system implies the development of a long-term financial plan, in which higher education will take an important place. Specifically, by allocating the currently available resources and determining the exact amount that one will be able to pay for sustaining each aspect of one’s life, it becomes easier to manage the financial requirements set by the higher education institution in question. Finally, suggesting applying for a grant as the means of handling the unreasonably high tuition cists is also viewed as a possibility.
However, the options listed above, including the final one, represent not a complete solution to the concern at hand but instead a temporary remedy to the problem that has been brewing for decades. Thus, rearranging the current system of higher education and reducing the costs by changing the curriculum, making higher education more accessible, and building it on the basis of online course currently offered by a variety of services appeared to be a sustainable and sensible solution.
Methodology
It is believed that a combination of policy changes and the development of strategies for students to minimize their expenses in order to pay their tuition fees should be viewed as the most sensible compromise in the described situation. To implement the project, a quantitative assessment of the improvements in the students’ financial status will be needed. Specifically, a comparison in the dropout rates among learners before and after the implementation of the offered step will be needed. For this reason, a longitudinal quantitative case study will have to be undertaken. The sample size will have to consist of at least 500 participants so that a general idea of the effectiveness of the offered tool should be developed.
Thus, the assessment of the tool’s applicability to the current educational setting will be possible. Furthermore, to avoid possible selection biases and the resulting inaccuracies in the assessment, the use of cluster sampling should be suggested. By dividing the target audience, specifically, college students, into several categories based on their economic background, one will be able to identify key trends in each group, thus testing the effects of the suggested solution on ach. To compare the effects of the suggested strategy applied to the higher education context, Student’s t-test will be performed.
Budget and Timeline
As emphasized above, the described approach will require a certain amount of time to be implemented since the effects of the suggested framework need to be tested properly. Therefore, it is expected that the project will take approximately eight months to implement. Additionally, the proposed change will require a total budget of $50,000. Namely, the specified amount will be used to create a team of experts that will support the students participating in the research in the management of college costs.
Additionally, fees for digital tools and resources that will help students in developing unique financial plans will have to be included into the range of cost demanded for the project (~$10,000). Finally, fees for transportation and, visual resources, communication, and other items will be incorporated into the overall list of expenses for the project in question.
It is believed that the suggested solution will allow for a compromise between the idea of rejecting higher education entirely and forcing students to experience massive distress due to the increasing costs and the resulting college debt. Each of the proposed option represents a viable idea. However, the combination of building a support system for learners who struggle financially and the creation of additional education options that will imply using digital tools and require a lesser amount of resources, particularly, lesser involvement of educators into the process, should be considered a viable framework for addressing the current problem of the student loan and college debt.
Works Cited
Hartlep, Nicholas D., Lucille LT Eckrich, and Brandon O. Hensley. The Neoliberal Agenda and the Student Debt Crisis in US Higher Education: Indebted Collegians of the Neoliberal American University. Taylor & Francis, 2017.
Nissen, Sylvia, Bronwyn Hayward, and Ruth McManus. “Student debt and wellbeing: a research agenda.” Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online, vol. 14, no. 2, 2019, pp. 245-256. Web.
Popescu, Gheorghe H. “Does student debt constitute a bubble that may bring about an educational crisis?” Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 50, no. 2, 2018, pp. 115-118. Web.
Ulbrich, Timothy R., and Loren M. Kirk. “It’s Time to Broaden the Conversation about the Student Debt Crisis beyond Rising Tuition Costs.” American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, vol. 81, no. 6, 2017, p. 101. Web.