Earning a degree is quite a challenge for a lot of students and parents. And a new study has found how most American colleges are unaffordable for the working class college students, who, as much as possible, do not want to resort to student loans. This makes the choices very limited for those who want to pursue higher education.

According to the analysis by the Institute for Higher Education Policy, even if students will be taking advantage of the federal student loans, 70 percent of colleges and universities are still unaffordable, Money reported.

While students from the higher income families can afford more than 90 percent of more than 2,000 colleges which were part of the study, students from the low income families can only afford 1 out of 5 percent of these schools, according to The Atlantic.

IHEP called a college "affordable" if the student will be able to pay the net cost by working for just 10 hours a week during a school year, with the help of their families who had put aside in a college savings account 10% of their disposable income for 10 years. It is assumed that families who are earning less than $50,000 don't have disposable income, which means that they might not have any savings as well.

The sad news is that while many schools claim to be affordable, it is a bit difficult to identify which colleges are not affordable for certain families in specific situations. The concept of the word "affordability" itself could be the issue because students don't know exactly how much their families can actually pay to send them to college and earn a degree.

What IHEP found was that only 2% percent of all the colleges across the country are able to provide enough aid or offer low tuition which makes them affordable to college students without having to apply for any loan, even if they come from families with less than $36,000 income.

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Tags Higher education, College, College students