Is it worth sacrifices?
I am 19 and a current student at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Coming out of college after my fiveyear degree plan, I will have about $50,000 in debt.
Due to this, I am front-loading my courses so I can finish a semester early (4½ years). This leads to semesters of 15 to 18 hours. I also had to get a part-time job to assist in daily expenses for food and rent. Being from out of state, I only received scholarship money from the nonresident tuition award. Even with this, I am still paying $20,000 a year.
The university has been very frivolous about giving out scholarship money while raising rates. The tuition cost for me raised $70 to $100 per class this year, while I have received no additional scholarship aid.
I believe I should be receiving more scholarship money, since I will have passed 87 credit hours (39 in Advanced Placement courses) in three semesters of enrollment while maintaining a 3.8 GPA and a spot on the chancellor’s list.
I also believe that the quality of education at the UA is declining due to overcrowding on campus, large classes, and overwhelmed support services.
The campus currently does not have enough on-campus housing for all freshmen—let alone everyone else—requiring apartment leases to be signed 10 to 12 months in advance to have a spot. I signed my lease for this year in October 2022.
Living off-campus adds many stresses, including transportation (buses run infrequently and usually are at capacity), extra payments for parking, food, and community connection.
The current state of tuition at UA and nationwide is unsustainable for many students and families. This is causing students to take on loads of debt, find jobs, and put an unhealthy amount of weight on grades to obtain any sliver of scholarship money. This creates a very stressful environment for a student such as myself, not even factoring in other items such as the cost of housing, living expenses, and transportation.
All of these factors are slowly coming to a tipping point in many American families over whether an increasingly unattainable financial sacrifice is worth the higher education their child receives.
DANIEL TRACEY
Fayetteville