The meaning of the Pell grant is to help economically disadvantaged students received a higher education by reducing the burden of the tuition and fee costs, and thereby, increase college participation. However, these good intentions of the Pell grant have caused one profound and unplanned consequence; which is the contribution to growing tuition cost for public and private colleges and universities. Supply and demand are the basic concepts of economics, so it’s no surprise that the increasing demand for higher education brought on by the Pell grant will have the consequence of rising tuition. More importantly, though, when Pell grants are used to pay for college, students are not as concerned with the cost as they would be if they were paying from their own pocket. As a result, the law of demand …show more content…
The goal of the tuition cap is to streamline the education financial process, rather than taking it away. Tuition caps should not create artificially low prices in the education market, but there needs to be extra pressure on colleges to contain costs; which there’s not right now. Requiring colleges to stay under the cap can help control the increasing prices of education, as the continual receival of federal funding and tax exemptions can be used as an incentive for those colleges who comply. Furthermore, tuition and fees have grown more than twice the rate of inflation each year (Wolfram, 2005). If colleges and universities choose to increase tuition cost more than the CPI, not only should they lose federal funding and tax exemptions, but also it should be mandatory for them to use money from their endowments to fully fund grants for students on financial aid; instead of the federal government increasing the Pell grant each award year to make up that extra