Unthank Hall is more than a shiny new building on campus, it is emblematic of the University of Oregon’s increasing cost to its students and the systemic growth of college inaccessibility. This is an issue because it runs contrary to conception that college is meant to be an institution of class mobility.
Class is not just the place you show up to, but also a system of categorization based on perceived economic and social standing. To move up the class ladder has long been the drive of American society, primarily achieved by going to college and receiving education for a lifelong career.
Though popular culture touts this American Dream as the birthright of all those willing to work for it, the facts simply don’t bear that out. Since 1980 the cost of higher education has doubled while wages have grown 0.3% annually, according a report in Forbes, despite 65% of U.S. jobs requiring a postsecondary education. Paradoxically, university is both necessary to acquire a career and ineffective in guaranteeing a stable middle-class future––as 60% of the most recent graduates, the millennial generation, live paycheck to paycheck.
Unthank is a $87 million stepping stone in the process of transforming campus’ residence halls with lavish prices as Unthank rooms cost between $14,488 and $19,692 annually. This is occurring while Walton is in the process of being knocked down, with Hamilton’s demolition coming next, and two Unthank-like halls are set to take their place. Dwindling are the affordable options that allowed a student a few years ago to live on campus for under $10,000. 
This grand transformation of campus is a response to the constantly declining enrollment numbers UO has experienced for the past decade. The unspoken truth is that these measures will attract a certain type of student: those who can afford it.
Discussions on the growing cost of college are nothing new, but the rhetoric rarely goes beyond debt and to the more systemic ramifications of class divide. College plays a different role today than it did for our parents. For those before us, it was an additional step to solidify themselves in the middle class. It was not uncommon for an accountant and a garbage collector to live on the same block. Widening the class divide will be the death of social mobility. The majority of Americans will be trapped in the lower class with ascension becoming an endeavor either unavailable or unfeasible without accruing mass amounts of debt. It is clear college will soon not be for the working class, and it is rare for a white and blue collar worker to live in even the same zip code.
All the while, college still holds a cultural significance in American hearts as a romanticized institution with whose sports teams and colors we decorate our lives. The consequences of this institutional change are twofold: Those who graduate will do so with debt, yet they will still have a cultural fondness for college; those who do not attend a university will be trapped as lower class workers, stuck in generational immobility.
This will become the norm as those in so-called “higher society” will not change their beloved institutions, and the lower classes will be unable to access journalistic, financial or political positions to enact change. As such, university will become a restricted ceremony that will separate different socioeconomic classes by manifesting itself as a natural, necessary institution culturally baked into American society.
I do not question the importance of college’s training and humbling exposure to the vast wealth of human knowledge, but instead resent the growing inaccessibility for the majority of the population to access those. If college is our culturally beloved institution that grants mobility it must be available to all that wish to use it. If that is not true, then the promise of the American dream with its opportunities is nothing but a ruse. Unthank Hall is not the final falling bastion that makes university wholly inaccessible, but a local example of the continuing trend that will lock the majority out of class mobility.