An Average Day Researching College Tuition
Author: Nathaniel Paulbeck | Major: Political Science and History | Semester: Spring 2024
Hello, my name is Nathaniel Paulbeck, a recent graduate from the University of Arkansas. I graduated from the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences with a bachelor’s degree in both political science and history. Also graduating with honors from the Honors College, my thesis advisor during my time researching my honors thesis was Dr. Thomas Adam, a professor in the political science department. He was my mentor throughout the Spring semester of 2024, and he assisted me in helping guide my research and provided his own research to aid me in mine. Over the last year, Dr. Adam has worked on collecting historical tuition data in ten-year increments for the time from 1840 to 2020 for 680 colleges and universities. This database is the only database that traces the growth of tuition charges over the last 180 years. With my honors thesis now finished and defended, my college career has now come to an end. As of May 2024, I am now an alumnus of the University of Arkansas and have since moved to Washington D.C. to work for the United States Senate.
The subject of my honors thesis paper was comparing the history of college tuition and the history of household income from 1840 to 2020 in order to see if I could find any correlation between the two. College tuition has become a popularly discussed topic in recent years, with college students facing increasing tuition charges nearly every year. Therefore, I tasked myself with comparing the history of college tuition prices with the history of household income to research whether college tuition prices were rising in unison with increases in household income, or if college tuition has been rising at an alarming rate. The benefit of this first-of-its-kind research is that this highly politicized topic can be uncovered to provide context and historiography to this subject.
I met Dr. Adam after having him as my professor for two history classes. I was incredibly intrigued by his teaching style, and his knowledge and passion for the subject areas he taught was inspiring. Therefore, when it came time to find an honors thesis mentor, it was a no-brainer. When speaking with him about research topics he is currently invested in, he mentioned he had been working on compiling tuition data from numerous universities. Initially, when deciding on what research topic I would like to pursue, I wanted to find a subject area that connected to my daily life. Upon hearing about his research interests, I was sold. He and I began to brainstorm in order to come up with a research question I could pursue to expand on his research. After much consideration, my current research question was solidified, and I began my research on this topic.
After completing my research and defending my thesis, I learned much about not only my research topic, but about myself as well. The culmination of my research showed that tuition and household income both grew at similar rates initially, but beginning around the 1990s, tuition prices, especially at private colleges and universities grew at much higher rates than household income growth. Therefore, I concluded that if trend was to continue, college tuition prices would begin to price more and more people out, causing a much less educated society in a world where advancements in technology, healthcare, and engineering are abundant. As for learning about myself, I became much more proficient at writing and researching academically. In my new career I am pursuing, I will be tasked to research and write about different legislative areas, and already having experience in this area will help tremendously. All in all, my honors thesis process was enjoyable and incredibly useful. It helped to prepare me for whatever comes next in my future career, and I couldn’t be more thankful for the University of Arkansas and the Honors College Research Grant for allowing this to happen.