research paper help on rising college tuition costs?

Question

so i want to write my research paper on the rising costs of college tuition but i dont know what to exactly write about.

i need an outline of some sort so please help me create subtopics to write about for this paper!

Answer 1

http://www.pe.utexas.edu/Dept/Org/Students/PGEGSA/docs/tuitionstudy.pdf is an example that someone wrote about Texas. There are some really good ideas in there if you can collect all of the data you'll need.

One thing I'd have liked to have seen in this paper is a comparison of the cost of tuition to average income over the same period. It might be interesting to see the numbers as 'tuition as a percentage of average income' and how that has risen or fallen over a long period.

"Grandpa worked his way through college" takes on a different meaning when you see that grandpa paid a couple $100 a year to attend college. ☺

Depending on the statistics you can find, it may be easier to write about a single college than about all colleges. If I were researching one college then I'd go to their library and see if they have a collection of the old course catalogs, those have tuition rates in them. If I were writing on nationwide, I might try to get a newspaper archive (NY Times) and see what articles I could find over time about the topic.

http://chronicle.com/stats/tuition/ will give you some tuition stats but not for very many years. It's still interesting though.

You may wish to consider cause - if so, inflation isn't going to explain it all away. Consider whether state level programs that pay tuition for students at a certain maximum amount have made colleges increase their fees to that amount.

Good luck

Answer 2

FYI, students a ASU, UofA, and NAU, are doing a survey, about the rising cost of tuition and are petitioning the board of directors with note cards, for putting a freeze on tuition. So you might want to try there sites.