One major lesson I learned while interviewing people about our economy is how different everyone really is here at UD. It was interesting to see how all different life experiences and economic situations converge on one college campus. I decided to make my first question relevant to where we are now. 

I asked: 

How do you pay for college? 

This is actually the question where the answers varied the most. One student simply answered, “Rich ass parents”. I assumed this would be the answer for a lot of students, but I was very wrong. I asked one of my good friends the same question, and her answer surprised me. She was the complete opposite. “I’m paying for everything myself”, she explained “working minimum wage jobs”. Her tuition is coming out of her own pocket, and the conversation I had with her exposed many of the issues with today’s college system. She is currently trying to declare herself independent, a long and dragged out process, but the FAFSA still uses her parent’s incomes as the base for how much financial aid she gets. Everyone I asked, including her, agreed that the idea of how we pay for college and the tuition itself needs a huge overhaul. 

“College squeezes every cent out of some people”, as someone else said. And in my opinion and many others, that is not okay. Tuition is incredibly expensive, and clearly the way our government supports those who need it most is ineffective and leaves people in severe debt. 

“The decisions we make so young affect the rest of our lives”, as someone put it,  and in our current system, those decisions can cost us thousands of dollars. The amount of pressure put on young people to figure out our financial situation before we are 20 continues to astonish me. How can we plan out the payment of our thousands of dollars of debt if we can’t even figure out how to pay $100 for a textbook?

Many interviews I had ended with a political discussion. Would a change of president change tuition prices, or the financial aid issues?  Pretty much everyone agreed it definitely wouldn’t. However I agree with the last person I interviewed, who said, 

“Ask me again in three years.”