After the polls in Pittsburgh closed and Luke Ravenstahl was re-elected as mayor, Ravenstahl… After the polls in Pittsburgh closed and Luke Ravenstahl was re-elected as mayor, Ravenstahl announced his intentions to propose a 1 percent college-education privilege tax on college students’ tuitions to alleviate financial struggles with the city’s pension fund.

In 2009, the equal opportunity to higher learning by all Americans is at a critical juncture, and Ravenstahl’s proposal for a higher-education tax increases the already devastating college fees and undercuts the general trend of exorbitant college costs.

Tuition and other college-related costs have consistently increased for 30 years.

Over the past five years, college costs have grown nearly 40 percent, with the tuition and fees of four-year public universities increasing 6.5 percent in 2008 alone.

Tuition and fees have increased in other private and two-year educational institutions, as well.

In 1979, the average tuition at a private four-year university cost approximately $9,000 to $10,000, adjusted to inflation. It is now roughly $26,000. Public two- and four-year institutions have seen their tuition rates virtually double in that same time span.

Currently, 60 percent of all college graduates leave college with debt that is on average more than $19,000.

Between 2001 and 2010, 2 million academically qualified students will not be able to attend college because they cannot afford it.

The current trend in rising tuition costs threatens to inhibit the potential of so many prospective students throughout the United States.

The 1 percent college-education privilege tax that Ravenstahl has proposed would require out-of-state Pitt students to pay an additional $230, with in-state Pitt students paying a $133 tax, according to average tuition rates.

Though Ravenstahl’s efforts might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of those frightening statistics, the college-education privilege tax demonstrates our inability to protect a fundamental human right: having equal access to higher education.

In a Post-Gazette article, Pitt student Josh Smith responded to the proposed tax by saying, “It’s kind of bullcrap.”

As a fellow Pitt student, I must agree.

Countless students are forced to acquire unprecedented levels of debt to pay for college tuition, and many have to take jobs, as well.

Ravenstahl’s proposal to tax college tuition adds even more financial pressure to students already struggling to manage the outrageous price of college tuition and life.

About 2,500 years after Plato proclaimed education as the fundamental scheme to creating an ideal society in his republic — and some 60 years after world-leading countries, including the United States, declared education a fundamental human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — the current state of affairs in the American education system struggles to uphold those principles.

Throughout the United States, countless people from inner-city neighborhoods and impoverished communities have already been denied the opportunity for higher learning.

If the United States must become a better, stronger, smarter nation — a nation capable of taking the global community into the 21st century — then it needs to allow those people to obtain a degree and thwart efforts to increase the cost of education.

Ravenstahl’s intent to tax Pittsburgh’s university students disregards efforts to make higher education more affordable.

He compromises not just the prospect of luring future students into a city that is increasingly recognized as a college town, but perhaps more significantly, he compromises the integrity of equal access to education.

E-mail Shane at [email protected].