College Education and the Class System - Essay Example

College Education and the System Research has been carried out over the past years to assess the effect of high cost of college fees on the equality in access to higher education. Researchers have focused on the impact of high college fees and the effect it has on admission processes as well as students selection criteria. The high cost of higher level education has been found to bring inequalities in the level of access to colleges. It has been found out that colleges have become a privy to certain students depending on their ability to pay college fees.

For example, access to Ivy League University is seen to favor those with fees funds as well as those who can afford to pay the upkeep in such colleges (Karabel 109). However, the rest of the youth are then left with the option of joining community colleges across the country or else join a labor market being unskilled that is highly skewed towards skilled laborers. This has promoted the existence of a class system with the rich attending high class or Ivy League Universities and landing the best paying jobs while the poor join the labor pool after secondary schools, and end up getting meager pay, which widens the gap between the poor and the rich even further.

To reduce the class differential and inequality in representation, colleges should come up with affirmative action and enforce them as well. Affirmative action helps to reduce the class system by taking into account factors like sex, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion or national origin to favor an unrepresented group in colleges like the poor, a certain race or religion (Karabel 123). This will help to counter past injustices like a history of discrimination which was the genesis of a class system.

Works Cited Karabel, Jerome. The chosen: The hidden history of admission and exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.