Multi-Source Analysis: Is the Cost of Higher Education Too High?

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Introduction
At the beginning of the 21st century, higher education has never been on high demand both from individual students and their families. It is believed that the viability of higher education will bring change to both social, political, and economic wellbeing of individuals and their countries. In fact, the basic financial challenges facing higher learning institutions are global in nature stemming from nearly universal forces. There is first the aspect of increasing the unit-per student in relation to the higher education costs. This is because offering higher education is both labor and capital intensive in nature. This is the reason why institutions have been resistant in adopting labor saving technologies (Brown & Carasso, 2013). 
The costs for acquiring higher education consist of both opportunity and upfront costs. Upfront costs include the total fees for tuition and the related expenditures, for instance books, travelling, accommodation, among others. These costs were estimated to be $10,133 per year in the United Kingdom (Brown & Carasso, 2013). This estimate was exclusive of living costs such as food and accommodation. On the other hand, opportunity costs refer to the wages that are forgone. These are income that an individual would have earned if he/she was not enrolled as fulltime students over a given period of time. The higher education cost is therefore the total of opportunity costs and the upfront costs an individual incurs while pursuing higher education (Brown & Carasso, 2013).  
Research Context
Many concerns have been raised concerning higher education worldwide. Interestingly, the issues raised are specifically related to the costs it is associated with. Its impacts are diversified, affecting both students, their parents, individual institutions as well as the government institutions. Many scholars have researched on this topic presenting diverse opinions about the cost of higher education. Some are concerned about the ability of students from low income families to afford higher education. Other scholarly works revolve around the higher education especially to the rural communities. It is indeed evident that higher education comes at some costs. But the issues that arise are; how this cost can be shared among the students, parents, learning institutions and government institutions. These are some of the issues which this paper tries to unveil and bring insights on whether the cost of education is too high. In fact, since time immemorial, education was considered as a basic right to everyone until recently when it was to be considered too expensive to afford for some. For instance, in the United States of America, reports indicate that approximately $20,000 was charged as tuition fee. This led to rising concerns about why the cost of education had become such expensive. This paper focuses on this analogy of the ever increasing costs of higher education by reviewing the available literature relevant to the topic and then making findings on the issue.
Rhetoric Analysis
“Is cost of higher education too high?” Most scholars have given divergent views on whether the cost of education is indeed too hi...