Barnard raised its tuition. Again. While Barnard is an exceptional school, one of a kind really, it becomes less appealing when the tuition is closer to $70,000 a year than $60,000. It now costs $65,992 to attend Barnard without any financial aid. This is an increase of $3,251 from this past year's rates.

Barnard is an all women’s liberal arts college in New York City, affiliated with an Ivy League University. This makes Barnard unlike any other college in the world. While this is appealing to many women -- women who are unique and striving to change the world -- some of these women cannot afford a school like Barnard. To get out of college with a debt of over $250,000 is crippling, limiting and life changing. While I know Barnard is trying to build a fabulous new library (which does look fabulous, by the way), a $3,000 increase is a lot of money for one year. By raising the tuition, Barnard is limiting the types of strong-willed people who can attend this school. More likely than not, the women who will be attending Barnard will be women from middle-upper class homes, rather than women who fought, worked and studied their way into college. These latter women are the women who will fight for change, who know adversity, who conquered their fears and other people’s doubts, and knew that education was important to them. These are the women we want at Barnard; these are the women who will change the face of this planet; these are the women who will rise up in any sector of society that they want to be in and be the leading ladies; these are the women who will later donate to Barnard because they respect and love the institution that it is because it fostered their interests. From this hypothetical statement, with these women’s future donations, Barnard does not need to raise its tuition by so much.

The women who did not have to fight to get into Barnard will probably thrive in any sector of society too, but will they appreciate the uniqueness that was attending this amazing all women’s college? Did they value the experiences of attending Barnard so much that they will, 15 years later, appreciate Barnard so much to donate? Or will they donate to their spouses college? As someone who has only recently started to realize the uniqueness that is Barnard College, after about three years of attending this school, I can say that many of my classmates do not look fondly upon their experiences at Barnard. This scares me. Only recently have I had the pleasure of realizing how great my education has been here, and how my experiences of attending this college has affected me, but so many of my fellow classmates have not had similar experiences.

Barnard needs to start focusing on how to change the experience of its students while they are here in college, so later, when they have graduated and are earning money, they will look back fondly on their college experience so much that they want to give back. By inhibiting the people who can attend Barnard by increasing the tuition, the administration is actually losing money in the long-run because the women who would probably be most appreciative of Barnard's uniqueness, cannot pay such sky-high tuition rates.