Imagine walking down the street and almost every person has a chain tied around their ankle. All are struggling to walk, the chain dragging and scraping the pavement. They can’t go far because if they do, the chain pulls them straight back to where they started. The clanking of the chains on the concrete gets louder and louder as more people crowd the scene. Everyone looks miserable with the constant weight keeping them from enjoying life. Parents and young people are locked down figuratively and literally. Two pedestrians stop and both shrug with the look of defeat on their faces, “College.”

Student debt is a major problem in the United States because college expenses are so high. According to the Washington Post, the cost of college tuition has increased by 2.4% after inflation as of October 2016. With the high price of college less people enroll which causes a domino effect of fewer and fewer people graduating college with a diploma. With fewer people having a college diploma, they can not make as much money as those who have a degree. The poor are less likely to take out loans or go to school.

Eliminating college tuition can help get rid of the divide in our society between the poor and the rich. It has been said by economists that this divide comes from the quality of education that each person is getting. Education should be a right rather than a privilege that people have to buy into. Every person should have the right to a basic education and take it a step further into college. A degree can get many on the right path to a successful life. Society generally accepts the idea that people who don’t go to college are not as “good” as people that do go. If college were free then the divide that society has built up could be brought down.

Without student debt the economy could get significantly better. If people didn’t have to give so much of their money to banks they could, instead, be taking all of that money and putting it back into the economy. If more people got a high paying job, the economy would get better because the amount of money that Americans make would increase, causing more people to pay more taxes building up the economy more.

            Although some say that if the government paid for college then there would be a higher need for technical or professional jobs and there might not be enough available. If everyone got a college degree then that would take away from the whole idea that it was special. Critics of this idea say that if more people went to college the campuses would get overcrowded, making the classes larger and cramped.

The government should pay for college because it would help a lot of people and help reduce the staggering amount of student debt in the country. If there was no cost people would be free to make the decision that is right for them without money being a problem. People would certainly not get a free pass to go straight into college, people would still have to apply and pay normal fees. The government should help to pay college tuition for students to guarantee equal opportunity. With the help of the government, anyone could thrive in a career. Many could get better jobs than what they could have hoped for and release the bounds that are holding them back from financial independence.