Coming from a middle-class household, money is not a surplus, and conserving money in any way possible is always a priority. So it's only right that the rising cost of higher education is frightening. This is the same for many students throughout the country whose families struggle to afford the costs of going to college. Many students are forced to stop attending. For many students, this happens because they can not keep up financially. This poses a serious threat to the education integrity and standard of the United States. With less people being able to afford higher education, less people will be able to attain degrees and receive college level education. This will lead to our educational rank as a country to ultimately decrease, as it is right now. Fixing this problem and getting the United States back to the top of the rankings like we used to be will not be an easy fix. It will take a well thought out, and discussed financial change in federal student aid programs to make higher education more accessible to those families with lower income who struggle to afford it.
In an article by Eduardo Porter of the New York Times entitled "Dropping Out of College, and Paying the Price", he states that "More than 70 percent of Americans matriculate at a four-year college - the seventh-highest rate among 23 developed nations."(Porter). Out of the seventy percent of Americans who attend, however, "less than two-thirds end up graduating." (Porter). This results in graduation rates in this country suffering, because as Porter states, "Including community colleges, the graduation rate drops to 53 percent. Only Hungary does worse."(Porter). Currently, the United States is ranked nineteenth out of twenty-eight countries in college graduation rates. A ranking that comes from the "OECD", which tracks education investment and performance of democracies(Porter).
