Search Engine Search: Rising Tuition

A previous post of mine entitled “Social Issues for College Students” detailed a list of issues that I felt were relevant to college students today. In my Digital Citizenship class, we have been assigned to address and explore one issue in depth and the one that I will be examining is the phenomenon of rising tuition costs. For purposes of context, I found this issue to be the most pressing for college students on both daily and long-term bases. If costs continue to rise, we will have students that are avoiding school because they are unable to afford it. The students that do take on the costs and attend school anyway are being saddled with crippling debt that will take several years to pay off. One of the big questions behind this issue are when do the benefits stop outweighing the cost? In other words, how much money is too much?

This week I have done a search engine search on the costs of higher education on the following engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. The results varied for each engine, but I was able to find some of the same information on each. I have found that the top results are not necessarily the best sources of information, which I would personally define as being scholarly in nature. The top results are those like The Huffington Post and The New York Times. While those two particular examples are more reliable than most because of more editing and checking of sources, they are still platforms that mostly express opinion. I understand more so than ever why professors are constantly telling students to use scholarly articles and databases for research. The simple fact of the matter is that scholarly resources are evaluated by experts in the field for accuracy, proper information gathering, and facts to back up opinions. I also noticed that DuckDuckGo (an incognito browser that does not track your online presence), presented me with more professional sites such as NPR and US News because it has no idea about the articles that I have previously read on the popular sites listed above.

I look forward to delving more into this topic because I find it to be of the utmost relevancy for college students today and those who love them.

 

Until next time,

MGH. Professor in Training

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