For far too long students of this generation have been breaking under the strain of a bloated state education system. Every year the national average cost of tuition is raised double or triple the interest rate.
It has become a tool used to make decisions that hardly benefit university students. When the University of California attempted to use that tool to pay for their poor governance, students took a stand. So should you.
Last week the University of California regents said “OK” to a 32 percent tuition hike. according to CNN. The tuition increase represents a little more than $1,800 per student, raising roughly $500 million to cover a shortfall in the budget. This shortfall comes from the state’s burgeoning debt, which is essentially handed down from more poor policy making at the state level.
Last year VCU raised the tuition 9.4 percent. This year it was 5.2 percent. VCU will also cut 91 positions this year. While Virginia’s universities are not in such dire straits as California’s, the challenges being faced there are the same being faced here.
They represent a clash between the university leadership’s idea of a fair price for education, and students who are forced to pay a bill that gets larger each year, for reasons that are not expressly indicated.
Our new President gets paid $488,500 annually, with $120,000 in allowances, and a signing bonus of $275,000. His wife also gets a job paying a $34,000 annual salary for a 20-hour-a-week position as the VCU international alumni relations liaison.
Not to say the President doesn’t deserve his salary, or his wife doesn’t deserve a job, but where is the commitment to the students? VCU’s enrollment has grown by 38 percent in a decade. Its commitments have been to expansion at any cost to students and academics.
This is the same story all over the United States. Higher education has become a business, a business of providing the cheapest product at the highest price, without regard for long-term goals. It has now become another bursting bubble-its services spread thin to keep inflating itself.
State institutions are dependant on state funding, which keep being cut. Expansive growth is no longer possible in these economic conditions. Education no longer has a high return on investment for the state. Therefore the quality of education keeps going down, even though its cost goes up every year (doesn’t that sound like health care debate too?).
Students can no longer afford to be taught by tenured professors-they are educated by grad students, adjunct professors and online computer courses. Yet when it comes to materials, instead of using technology to get an e-book, they are assigned mandatory texts costing $100 to $300, which hardly any professor teaches out of.
When it comes to loans, students are forced into unbelievable debt. The school profits at their expense, and actually encourages late graduation by poorly structuring graduation requirements. Can someone please tell me what the hell “Focused Inquiry” is?
It’s a 1-credit excuse of a course about nothing that students are mandated to take. The term “focused inquiry” means “thinking hard about finding answers.” Even a mandatory course on the history of Richmond would be more educational, or better yet, go back to assigning mandatory English 100, where students were taught high school English for the second or third time in a row.
Where is the campus debate? Where are the students doing sit-ins and marches and protests and some good old-fashioned hell raising? They are in California, because 32 percent is 30 percent too much. Yet here sits VCU, vapid and apathetic, its students complaining about everything under the sun, but no one doing anything.
So here’s the call to action. Write to the Commonwealth Times, explain what you think needs to be done, what you think students are lacking. Use this paper as it is meant to be used! Students can advertise with us for next to nothing, and if your cause is about campus activism, we’re more than likely to send a reporter.
We will magnify your voice by publishing your opinions, we will connect you to the people you need to talk to and we will make sure your needs are respected as a paying member of the student body.
When University of California students, faculty and staff took a stand against this injustice, the university arrested hundreds of them for trespassing. This and every other university, belongs to the students and the staff that operate it, not the people who own its buildings. We must command our own futures, and it starts by demanding the full measure of what we have paid for.