College was not always seen as a logical educational step after a student completed high school, but now it is and higher education is more expensive than it has ever been.

In a new report from NPR, parents of incoming college students are becoming increasingly frustrated with the rising cost of tuition. For one, the price is rising fast and two, it is far more important to have a degree than it is to have a diploma.

Jeffery Corbett does not have a degree, but he does have a diploma and he is ensuring his daughter works toward a college education because he knows of the setbacks that come with not having one.

"I think about it all the time, because I realize [how] it has limited me, by not having that piece of paper," he told NPR.

Corbett lives in Oklahoma, a state whose tuition has stayed consistently low compared to the rest of the nation. Still, when Arizona's tuition spikes 77 percent in five years, Georgia's 75 percent and Washington State by 70 percent, comparatively low is still fairly high.

Fueling many families frustration is the increasingly unforgiving job market. The earnings gap between diploma- and degree-holders is the highest it has been in nearly 50 years.

"The unemployment rate is high. Nobody's wages have gone up in recent years," Sandy Baum, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told NPR. "Increases in college tuition at public colleges, particularly in recent years, have really been unacceptable. And there's no question that that is a much higher percentage of median [family] incomes than it used to be."

At some point in history, a college education stopped being classified as a privilege for children of wealthy families and was eventually considered affordable for everyone. That point was after World War II with the GI Bill of Rights, NPR reported.

John Thelin, a University of Kentucky professor and author of "A History of American Higher Education," said the GI Bill was not expected to get so many people enrolled in college. Several states did not heighten tuition costs even though they could because they liked the expansion of higher education.

Soon enough, the federal government began offering similar financial aid to citizens and American colleges became even more populated. In the 1970s, the economy began to slow and the government was not able to pay as much of students' tuition and fees bills as they used to.

Baum said this point in time, when family incomes grew at a slower rate and when school became more expensive, is when student loans really took off.

"So it's not that colleges are spending more money to educate students," Baum told NPR. "It's that they have to get that money from someplace to replace their lost state funding - and that's from tuition and fees from students and families."

She said that essentially allowed schools to make students think their institution was of a higher quality because the price tag was larger.

"There's certainly evidence that people don't know how to measure the quality of a college education," Baum said. "They think that if it's expensive it must be better. I don't think colleges want to have high prices, but I do think they see strategic reasons why it may be in their interest to have high prices."

Related