Within the past few years, inflation has led to harsh, negative effects for many Americans across the country.
Inflation has been on the rise since COVID-19. Due to inflation, everyday items such as food, gas, hygiene supplies and many more have increased in cost. Many stores and restaurants have increased their prices continuously to the point that $100 doesn’t allow most people to buy groceries and a standard meal from a fast food restaurant sits at around $10 or more.
Although inflation targets all Americans, the increase in prices affect college students especially harshly. On top of rising prices, college tuition and rooming situations have increased in price year after year. Most students don’t make enough money to live a comfortable lifestyle while in college, especially if they are expected to pay for college and living expenses themselves.
While these prices start to soar higher and higher, the average pay for Murray State students has stayed relatively stagnant. Students working on campus typically make around $8 an hour, and students who work off campus make from minimum wage to around $15 an hour if they are lucky.
So what would be a good solution for these issues that many college students face? Well, one thing that could be done is increasing the minimum wage. A minimum wage increase would allow for students to be able to purchase more goods and have more money to do what they want to do.
A common argument that I hear is that prices will increase because everyone is making more money. I would counter this argument by saying that it doesn’t matter if you raise the minimum wage or not because the price for everything has skyrocketed either way.
Another idea that can be used to help college students is student loan forgiveness. The idea behind the student loan forgiveness is to allow students or former students to be set up with a promising future without the fear of crippling student loan debt dragging them down.
A lot of taxpayers dislike this idea because they do not want to pay for other people’s degrees, which is a fair point. With this issue, I personally believe that the best idea is to get rid of or lower the interest rates on these loans. Getting rid of the interest rates doesn’t affect taxpayers because they don’t have to pay for these loans while helping decrease the amount of student loan debt in the country.
Now, the big issue with inflation is obviously the increase in prices. If everything continues to increase as it has been, then all the fixes above won’t matter because students would still remain too broke to pay for anything. The most efficient way for this to stop would be if the government would step in to fix this, but some people oppose the idea of government interference in business.
Many changes can be made to this issue but not just one can fix it. Fixing inflation will take a lot of work to fix but I believe that it is one of the important things we should focus on as a country. If we choose to forget this issue, it will never get fixed and will only get worse. The changes I mentioned above can help combat inflation but those aren’t the only things that can be done to reduce inflation. What needs to be done is that people, businesses, and politicians need to focus on combating inflation. It can be fixed but it will require a lot of work to fix this issue.
