Student Pays Tuition In $1 Bills To Protest High Cost Of College

A student who paid his tuition in $1 bills has been trying to raise concern over the rising high cost of college tuition.

In a related story by The Inquisitr, crazy student loans caused one student to sell ad space on his graduation cap.

University of Utah student Luq Mughal literally paid his tuition in $1 bills, hauling in a briefcase stuffed with $2,000. Like many college students he both works to pay off the debt and at the same time goes to college for an electrical engineering degree. The craziest part is that he actually pays less than most because his father works at the college:

“By no means am I the saddest story on campus. There’s a lot of people here just as bad and probably worse. The people making the prices are not actually aware of how hard it is on the students. If everyone here brought a chest of money like this, I’m sure by the end of the day, there would be a lot of people talking about it that could actually make a difference in what we are paying for tuition.”

And he’s apparently correct. Reports claim the cost of college tuition has more than double in 10 years, rising from $2,742 in 2003 all the way up to $6,511 in 2013. The current plans also calls for yet another five percent increase in 2014. While this increase is less than the 8.5 percent average in the last two years, it’s still way above the 10 year inflation rate of 1.5 percent as reported by the US government. So if his friends wanted to also pay their tuition in $1 bills they’d have to lug in a briefcase over three times the size.

So why did Mughal pay his tuition in $1 bills?

“When you spend cash, you feel every dollar that you hand over to someone else. You feel that you’re losing that. If you just swipe your card, it could be 10,000 or 100,000 bucks and you don’t really feel it. When you actually slide over a huge pile of cash, you really feel like you’ve spent that. That’s your money, and you also want to make that worthwhile by doing well in school.”

But why has the cost of college tuition risen so steeply during this time frame? Colleges are apparently attempting to make themselves more competitive and as such they’ve increased their spending on non-essentials like housing, dining, and intercollegiate athletics. Even more disturbing, these auxiliary services are often used to generate additional revenue from the student body. Worse yet, some experts claim that after topping $1 trillion the rising student loans could trigger another recession which could match the impact of economic collapse felt after the housing bubble burst.