The Best Colleges With Tuition Under $20K
By Jordan Rosenfeld of GOBankingRates |
The class of 2019 was the last of the millennial generation to graduate from college. And while that is something to celebrate, many members of this age group are now saddled with insurmountable student loan debt. Add to this a global pandemic, in which most students must study at home until it’s safe to return to campus, and it’s an interesting time to be a college student.
Historically, tuition costs have risen 3% every school year; after the Great Recession, state budget cuts caused tuition and fees to skyrocket. State funding in 2018 for two- and four-year colleges was more than $6.6 billion below the 2008 funding, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. These ever-rising costs make it considerably difficult for students to even enroll in college, let alone graduate.
In eighth grade, during a physics and chemistry unit in a science class at Washington Middle School, Paxson Swierc was already jumping ahead in the textbook. He saw a unit that wasnât on the class syllabus about types of decay and equations related to mass.
âI went and asked the teacher about it and she said, âWe arenât going over that because itâs too complicated, so youâll learn about that in high school,ââ Swierc said. âI was like, âNo, I want to learn about it now.ââ
Four years later, the Hellgate High senior is prepping for a degree in astrophysics at the University of Chicago, which he said wouldnât be possible without the full-ride, four-year scholarship he was recently awarded.