The financial dilemma beleaguering today’s youth in the rubble of an economic recession is the growing cost of acquiring a diploma from a four-year university. The costs have been slowly rising over the last couple decades, but the students hurt the most from this economic pox are those who attend public universities, who have been deprived of federal and state funding.

Universities are normally given large pools of funds to provide aid to those who are financially incapable of funding their education. But oddly enough, less selective schools give the least to aspiring students desperately yearning for an education. A recently published New York Times article revealed an alarming trend among state universities across the United States nowadays — schools are receiving more funding from the state for financial aid, but they are allocating it specifically to merit-based awards.

The cost of a public university has increased by 104 percent in the last decade on account of minimized funding from the government. So, at an average of $23,000 a year for a public four-year university, and with the median household income for the nation at roughly $51,000, the tuition of a single child is half of an average family’s annual income. It becomes an excellent inquiry, then, as to why public universities are doling out money to those above that 50 percent, who are more capable of covering these expenses, than to those who cannot.

Public universities claim they are attempting to prevent a brain drain of their talent reservoirs and motivate high school achievement. The idea of rewarding merit and accomplishment is understandable and even encouraged by American higher education. However, studies and statistics show that higher income students perform the same with or without these incentives and are actually more likely to do poorly than if they went to a private university that met their academic caliber.

This system deeply hurts minorities, especially in areas of large urban sprawl that occupy much of the lower income brackets that are incapable of affording these rising costs. If the education system is incapable of assisting populations affected by lack of said education in affording or motivating their children to succeed, then it has no hope of actually ameliorating the conditions of abject poverty.

A state university’s goal is to provide a solid four-year education to students who want to make a living in the globalizing economy. A bachelor’s degree is slowly becoming expected of everyone and can award almost double that of what someone with just a high school diploma can earn. The goals of this allocation of funds are economically shortsighted and ineffective. Education should be an equalizer, so it is unnerving to see it used to exacerbate the nation’s growing inequality.