Matthew Lillig Source 3

Step 1:

A) Making College More Affordable. Implications Of New Data. [Electronic Resource] :. n.p.: [Washington, D.C.] : Executive Office of the President, Council of Economic Advisers, [2011], 2011. MERLIN. Web. 11 Oct. 2016.

B) What are other ways that college can be made more affordable to support the idea of college worth?

C) BEFORE: Looking forward to seeing how this article supports the idea of education in an affordable way, also want to see if any of the other points that I bring up will be mentioned. Such as trade school, or cutting out gen eds or big name college gen eds. This is going to be a good article because it addresses problems in a neutral matter that will allow for both the positives and the negatives of higher ed and their worth. DURING: “Nearly 2/3rds of the workforce will be required to have a higher education than high school grad.” Pell aid provides over 9 million students with financial aid. TAKE NOTE OF CHART. Federal debt system helping students cap debts at 10% instead of increasing, lowering monthly payment, etc.

Step 2:

P1 Summary:

Basically what I got out of this is that college is becoming more expensive. Not the best article for the topic that I am discussing, and although it touched upon a few federal loan programs, and implication that our current president has made that has allowed for a small stagger in price of education I haven’t gotten much. Although that being said I now have a concrete concept of just how much college is growing over the years, for both 2-year public, 4-year public, and 4-year private education. On top of that I now know which parts of education are becoming more expensive and which parts are making it more affordable: tuition is going up, federal and state are going up (although not at the same pace).

P2 Think:

This is important to understand because it shows that the government both state and federal are attempting to help with the going problem that is the cost of education but at the same time they are just not doing enough. This article was written in 2011 so it is worth noting that with Barack Obama’s introduction into the presidential seat this was a more important topic as it was addressed in his state of the union speech. I still believe this information can be used because it shows a trend of how much the price of higher education continues to grow and that isn’t going to stop anytime too. This article brought up the point at least that with the growing cost of education so is the average salary. What needs to happen now is for those two numbers to rise parallel to each other which the currently do not.

P3 Synthesize:

This article is really hard to draw a synthesis from because it is very independent of the two articles but it does touch on a few similar points that the previous articles drew from, mainly that college is becoming way too expensive. As article one would say that the price of college although costing more each year is still showing value directly correlated with receiving a bachelor's degree after, article 2 would follow up by saying that although this is true the cost is making it harder and harder for people to even afford this education in the first place to receive the pay-off that follows. Article 3 in turn would support article 2’s claim by showing the levels in which higher education’s price has gone up.

P4 Question/Plan:

Following this article I need to get back on topic. I think that especially when it comes to higher education there is more that can be changed to make a 4 year college less expensive, I want to figure out what those are. At this point in time, I have seen the progression of price, argued the value of gen eds and non career based courses, and now am going to try and find alternative methods to getting a the skill set a bachelor's degree provides. I am going to tackle the idea of knowledge vs applied skills.