Opportunity and Higher Education: Rising Tuition and the American Dream
In a nation known as the land of opportunity, too often is opportunity a millennium away. Almost 250 years ago, with the pen of a new nation, our founding fathers wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to ensure that every American has the right to life, liberty and property. The core thesis that ties these rights together is one word: opportunity.
The word opportunity derives from the Latin phrase ob portum veniens, literally translating to coming toward a port. When the wind shifted favorably and blew a ship towards the safety of a harbor, new aspirations were forged. The United States of America is meant to be an embodiment of this sailing vessel.
Before independence, European settlers sailed the Atlantic ocean seeking opportunity through land and religious freedom. In England, policies like the Enclosure Movement, which kicked farmers off of their land, inspired a generation of nomads to seek opportunity in the colonies. Similarly, repeated German crop failures, complemented by the promise of cheap and abundant land in America, pulled migrants to settle in the Land of the Free.
In the following two centuries, immigrants and opportunity came to build the great American nation—with each ship hitting the ocean, with each locomotive hitting the track, and with each automobile hitting the road. Recently, however, Americans have been losing opportunity. While opportunity in the past referenced the innate desire for physical capital property, opportunity in the present references the other two thirds of our father’s natural rights: life and liberty. With each new decade, intellectual capital is becoming more and more pertinent in the American life. The right to life is preserved with a vivacious upbringing that manifests in the classroom. Yet a myriad of Americans continue to lack the liberty to realize this intrinsic facet of vitality. One of the most significant institutional blockades to this right in the 21st century is the rising cost of college tuition.
Simply put, college tuition is too expensive for many Americans. According to the Education Data Initiative, tuition prices in the 21st century have increased 41.7% faster than the cost of inflation, while the average cost of tuition and fees climbed 93.2% in the past 21 years (Forbes). For a graduating high school student, even a differential as small as 1% could be the difference between a future and a life in purgatory.
Despite high sticker prices, universities have put in place programs to reduce the financial burden on interested students with this formula:
Cost of Attendance (COA) - Student Aid Index (SAI) = Financial Need
Cost of attendance is the total initial price, which includes tuition, fees, room and board, supplies, and personal and travel expenses. Student Aid Index is calculated from a snapshot of financial aid information, which is incorporated from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and/or the nonfederal CSS/Financial Aid PROFILE Forms, which provide information on parental and student income and assets. This data is subtracted to form a Financial Need difference and a Financial Aid Package, which consists of three types of aid: Grants and scholarships, Federal work-study, and Student Loans (The Princeton Review).
Frequently, however, receiving financial aid isn’t enough to cover attendance. Left-leaning think tank Brookings Institution found in May of 2026 that middle-income families—typically earning between $50,000 and $125,000 per year—fall into a “missing middle” where they earn too much for meaningful need-based aid but too little to comfortably afford college. Low income students often have to rely on welfare programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to afford groceries and reduce their COA. When scholarships are insufficient, many prospective students are forced to look elsewhere for education, or simply choose not to enroll.
A 2026 study conducted by EAB, an education research, technology and consulting company that partners with schools across the nation, found that 67% of high school graduates not attending college cited cost-of-living concerns as their main decisive factor. The results of this motive are shocking. Using data constructed by the National Center for Education Statistics, the Brookings Institution found in January of 2023 that only 51% of students from low-income families choose to enroll in college, and only 64% from middle-class families enroll. Crucially, nine in ten students from well-off families get the benefit of a college education.
High tuition prices are the epitome of a socioeconomic divide that extends beyond the past and into the future. Education is intended to provide social mobility, but when diplomas are only offered to those with means, opportunities remain inaccessible to the vast majority of Americans. The Social Security Administration tells us that a bachelor’s degree alone can lead to an increase of between $600,000 and $900,000 in median lifetime earnings compared to those who only obtain a high school degree. A major reason for this increase in earnings is employer confidence– Gallup found in October of 2026 that 8 in 10 employers prefer to hire a candidate with a bachelor’s degree compared to those with a high school degree. In terms of social mobility, a college degree is definitionally a gateway to improved social conditions; consequently, the federal government has a moral imperative to take action and reduce tuition prices. There is no reason why the Land of Opportunity and the Home of Liberty should allow for a plethora of Americans to remain trapped in a status quo that pushes down instead of picking the bottom up. Rising college tuition is a constitutional contradiction that swears in the face of the skeleton of our nation. We, the students, deserve better.
One possible solution that would allow the stream of opportunity to flow back into the lives of students is to address the “Bennett Hypothesis.” According to The Century Foundation, in 1987, President Reagan’s secretary of education, William J. Bennett, “took aim at higher education, accusing colleges and universities of raising tuition excessively because they knew the federal government would provide the grants and loans to cover the costs.” In other words, when colleges are confident that more federal funding will come, they are incentivised to make their prices higher and higher. A 2015 New York Federal Reserve Study corroborated this, finding that colleges raised posted tuition prices at a rate of approximately 58 cents for each dollar of additional subsidized cap and unsubsidized cap of federal student loans, while a dollar increase in the Pell Grant maximum translated to a 37 cent increase in sticker price. Federal financial aid is governed by Title IV of the 1965 Higher Education Act (HEA), and thus Congress should investigate amending this code to combat this feedback loop and provide amnesty for millions of students nationwide.
Alternatively, by utilizing a core aspect of fiscal federalism via educational funding grants, the federal government could simply make public college free nationwide. The Education Data Initiative estimates that universal free public college would cost the federal government between $34.59 billion and $99.49 billion a year in 2025 dollars. These project costs represent between 0.49% and 1.42% of U.S. government spending. While this is a substantial investment, it may be exactly what the American public needs to thrive in the 21st Century.
It’s time that Congress finally steers the ship of opportunity into the port of societal change. The United States has been a nation for 250 adventurous years. It’s time we turn the page onto the next 250 years, institute public policy that fulfills society's needs, and end the story of unreachable tuition for America’s youth.
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