Mitch Landrieu: “Throughout the next month, hundreds of thousands of high school seniors across this Nation will open up their mailboxes…”

“Throughout the next month, hundreds of thousands of high school seniors across this Nation will open up their mailboxes and receive acceptance letters for college. They will begin planning where they will live and what they will study for the next 2 or 4 years. These students will dream big and have grand ideas about what college will mean for them, but before they can officially enroll, they will be slapped in the face with a very real question: how are they going to pay for it? Attending an institution of higher education can be expensive. According to the National Center for Higher Education, the cost of attending two or four year, public and private colleges has increased faster than both inflation and family income. In 2000, families in the lowest quartile of the income bracket spent as much as 25 percent of their annual income to send their children to a public, four year college, compared with only 13 percent in 1980. At the same time, though, sources of federal assistance are diminishing.”