I got 10.2 Million Dollars In Scholarships and it’s not enough

I got 7 million dollars in scholarships and I think it’s not enough, here’s why. There is over one trillion dollars in student debt in the United States as of today,  yes, obviously I got a lot of ‘free’ money from colleges and universities when I applied, and I worked very hard over the entirety of my high school career to get the grades that would get me noticed by some of the top schools in the country, and I got incredibly, and I am incredibly grateful for not only being able to pursue higher education but also being able to do so in a way that leaves me with a much smaller burden of debt then most people. But, the collective 7.6 million dollars of merit scholarships that I was offered from the 101 universities that accepted me, will most likely not end up being enough to stop me from graduating with debt, and the overall program of over 1 billion dollars in scholarships that are awarded each year to high-achieving students in the U.S. will most likely not fully realize its goal of improving the quality of life of high-achieving students, these scholarships also do not even remotely come close to covering the cost of living anywhere in the United States. These reasons and more are why the college system in America is inextricably broken. 

Let’s start with the basics, there is a growing and crippling student debt crisis in the United States of America, President Joe Biden did at one point attempt to alleviate the bleeding with forgiving outstanding student loans under 20k, but this executive order was overturned by the Supreme Court and now Americans are faced with a crippling 1 trillion dollars of debt. Debt that you cannot get rid of through bankruptcy, debt that can stop you from pursuing further education, and debt that will likely follow you for decades after graduation. This is not acceptable in a developed country, even a largely neoliberal leaning country that hasn’t had a properly left-wing government in half a century like Britain has a cap on what tuition can be charged to students for an undergraduate degree. Undergraduate education is not a superfluous thing in the developed world, the choice for modern Americans is a degree that burdens them with potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, or struggling to buy groceries and never being able to fully realize their potential. This is not acceptable. America needs to cap the price of tuition for Private Institutions and get rid of it all together for State Universities, any other solution to this crisis is a band aid that will not last. We need real and permanent change to make this country a better place, and fixing our broken education system is one of them. It has been rumored that President Biden is considering expanding his original debt-relief to all student debt, but the fact is that this will likely be struck down by the supreme court again, and even if it does somehow manage to survive, there will be more students enrolling in University this year, students that will have to take on life-shattering amounts of debt that will most likely stick with them until the day that they die.  

The reason that this debt is so ridiculously out of control in the United States is the cost of living for students, which many students have to borrow to cover, and scholarships most of the time don’t cover. Of the nearly 100 universities I’ve gotten some sort of offer of admissions from, only two have merit scholarships that would have an amount of money that contributes to the cost of living. In fact, even with the 7.5 million dollars in scholarships that I’ve received with 100 university acceptances, with cost of living taking into account, plus 80,000 dollars in parent contribution for each university taken into account, the average college I got into would land me 500 dollars in debt, before even taking into account the cost of living. All of these factors show us that college tuition is absolutely unaffordable. If 7.5 million dollars in aid isn’t enough to cover not only tuition- but also cost of living, we have a serious problem in the nation. 

Merrit is great, it’s what makes products that are amazing, great ideas, and ultimately what makes people successful in general. Merrit is something that absolutely should be considered in the college admissions process, in fact, it should probably be considered more than it is now. In a world where extracurriculars and the whims of a college admissions officer often determine the admissions at the highest levels of college admissions, merit is absolutely something that needs to be at the forefront of this ever-more cutthroat world of college admissions. That being said, morally, it is repugnant to include merit as a reason one should be able to afford college. It is the absolute right of a person to attend college, it is often the barrier to entry for even more low-paying jobs. In the modern era, it is despicable that we do not have a more comprehensive need-based approach to financial aid, and it is absolutely repugnant that people are not able to attend the universities that they otherwise would because of astronomically high costs of attendance. Now please be reminded, this is not me saying that merit has no place in college admissions, but after the admissions process, there should be no barrier to entry other then willingness to attend a university. After all, if you’re meritorious enough to attend a university, how are you not smart enough to afford it? 

That being said about merit scholarships, even ultra-achieving students, who manage to beat the odds with unique applications and great essays, test scores, and a 4.0 or even 5.0 gpa, sometimes get prohibitively small scholarships to the schools they wish to attend by virtue of the simple fact that there are more high-achieving students that would attend any given prestigious university then there are prestigious universities. By the basic laws of supply and demand, since demand for scholarships are high, and supply is relatively low (even at schools with multi-billion dollar endowments such as Harvard or Yale), the price of attending a University gets higher and higher. This squeeze on prices will only get worse as time goes on, and we will only get higher and higher costs of attending college, until this nation inevitably falls behind nations that have learnt that every student that has the ability to fare well in a good school has the right to attend that school. Both for the benefit of the nation and for the benefit of the student we must have our rights secured. In the language of American politics all citizens are endowed by the declaration of independence to the right to the pursuit of happiness, in order to pursue that happiness in most cases, we need a secure income, and to secure that income for most occupations you need at least a bachelor's degree. All of these things, that secure our ordained rights to life, liberty, and happiness, must in turn be rights that all individuals in the United States have the right to enjoy and exercise. 

In summation, the solution to the College debt crisis isn’t forgiving student debt, but reorganizing higher education to be largely free for the vast majority of students. Whether it’s showing that the little student debt relief that President Biden has provided hasn’t gone far enough by far, or whether it’s showing that 7.5 million dollars in merit scholarships provided by 100 different schools still isn’t enough to prohibit taking out loans due to the cost of living in the United States, and the prohibitively high cost of tuition, the general unfairness of being academically capable of attending a given university but not good enough to afford one, or whether it’s the fact that increasingly competitive admissions have made it almost impossible to garner a merit scholarship from a desirable school even for the valedictorians of the nation, we must fix college admissions in this nation. If we don’t, America will inevitably fall behind our more reasonable peers, and our populace will gradually end up more and more uneducated, and we will backslide. In order to secure every Americans right ordained to them by the declaration of independence centuries ago, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we must not be coy about turning university sharply away from basically a for-profit mechanism into a not-for-profit extremely regulated and largely state-owned industry. Every American that believes in fairness, freedom, and liberty, must believe that we have to fix these things. 

CORRECTION 03/08/2024 9:22 EST: An earlier version of this article stated that Valat received "7.1 percent million dollars from 94 different universities", this has been corrected for grammar and accuracy, as the number and amount of Universities has changed from the beginning of writing this article.