You can’t claw your way to the kitchen in the morning to grab a cup of coffee without stumbling on one or another article raising alarms about skyrocketing college tuition. You may have gotten so inured to the whole topic to not even have noticed that I used the noun “alarm” and the adjective “skyrocketing”, without so much as justifying their use. That, unfortunately, is the vernacular we’re stuck with these days. But is it the appropriate language to describe the current situation?
I would argue no. Today, the mere existence of conversations like this one demonstrate that the era of unrestrained, irreversible tuition increases is over and that we’re merely reacting, justifiably, to what transpired during the 2008-2013(?) economic disaster. That damage has been done – nowadays colleges are sheepishly, reluctantly and slowly trying to minimize reverberations from the sticker shock that is manifest to anyone who graduated before 2005.
I’ll elaborate more in my next post
