OPINION: Raise Tuition for Status Ignition

By Broadside Correspondent Andrew Brown

On a drizzly Friday evening last November, I sat in a Starbucks in our nation’s capitol, enjoying a hot café mocha with a friend. Suddenly, I heard a commotion outside and hurried to get a better look. Standing amid a crowd of gaping onlookers, I beheld protestors representing the ogre organization “Students for a Democratic Society”—the largest, most contentious college student association in the country— marching through the streets, carrying doodled signs and shouting slogans of discontent about a “student debt crisis” and the need for “accessible” higher education.

There must have been a total of tens of thousands of Washington residents who witnessed this. Intersections everywhere were clogged with endless traffic jams. I was shocked that our public streets were being taken over. They virtually shut down the city with their antisocial, histrionic behavior. It turns out, as I discovered, that this wasn’t happening just in Washington or even just all over the country, but all over the world.

It is already enough that the new president is swinging from a White House chandelier, yowling for redistribution, trying to pluck bright crystals of hard-earned wealth from our most distinguished citizens in order to give them to the lazy partygoers, many of whom are uninvited guests who shouldn’t be here in the first place. In addition to this, though, now mobs everywhere are trying to bring the whole beautiful chandelier crashing down.

Over the past decade, student debt levels have increased by 108 percent, according to a 2004 report published by the College Institute for Affordability and Success. Why is this, though? Because of university “greed”? That’s not a viable explanation. It’s because liberal professors are ruining our higher educational system, offering a useless curriculum and forcing students to spend money on precious course space.

The bottom line is that tuition needs to be raised next year and preferably by the maximum 10 percent. It will be good for the university, its investors and its image. It will help us maintain the top spot as the premiere rising college in America. The parents of our pampered students can afford it, but they’re just greedy.

I always pass by the Students for a Democratic Society in the Johnson Center on Wednesday night. Some would say they’re dangerous. This Wednesday, they were huddled around a table near the information desk, petitioning for lower tuition, as the student body sat around ignoring them—indifferent to their cause—because deep down, everyone agrees that they’re wrong about the purported student debt “crisis” (and most of the ones who don’t are too apathetic to do anything). No, they’re not dangerous. They’re harmless. Education is already accessible and democratic for anyone willing to learn. My dad worked hard so I could go to school to strive towards becoming an educated alumnus, and I’ll work hard for my children’s future.

So when they passed my sidewalk on that night last November, I did what any representative of freedom would do . . . I gave them thumbs down and shouted my discontent right back.