« Ice cream and environmentalism | Main | Authoritarians are irrational. So is Bush. »
October 19, 2004
Editorial
Faced with consecutive years of double-digit tuition hikes, the Minnesota State Student Association (MSSA) has called for a tuition freeze and encouraged state-school students to sign endorsement cards.
Hamline hasn’t experienced tuition jumps as dramatic as our public-school peers, but, nonetheless, our tuition has, like world sea levels, risen steadily over the past decade. And it is as unrealistic to expect a tuition freeze as it is to expect an administration wage freeze.
How long until our financial dikes break? How long until we are submerged in debt, like Holland will one day be submerged in the sea?
It could be time that we considered alternatives to this whole college game. It’s generally taken for granted by teachers, parents, and those ever-helpful high-school counselors that anyone who manages to graduate from high school should go running happily after a bachelor’s degree.
But is what basically amounts to a four-year-long summer camp really worth dropping a hundred thousand dollars on and spending a significant portion of your life in debt for?
In our news pages this week, we feature two successful Hamline graduates, and we hope that we too will someday be as successful. However, we are similarly aware of other Hamline graduates who have, just weeks after graduation, returned to truck-loading, food-serving, and unemployment.
Some students who fail in college may be blamed for not using adequately the available resources. But perhaps if these students were not pressured by both guidance counselors and college recruitment divisions, they would be off happily exploring culinary arts and master mechanic degrees. And we all know that the world needs psychologists, sociologists and philosophers, but everyone serving in those positions certainly needs food prepared and cars fixed as well.
Minnesota Public Radio’s Kerri Miller held a debate on Midmorning two weeks ago over a notion that with recent sharp tuition spikesčspikes that will only continuečsome students would be better off choosing technical or trade schools over liberal-arts colleges. It was well acknowledged during the debate that the financial burden of college, for some, is simply no longer worthwhile.
As our industrial civilization has trapped us in an environment increasingly hostile to life, so too has our college education condemned us to a life of debt and wage-slavery.
So, ask yourself these questions. Is college worth it? Do you really want to be here?
Posted by msveum at October 19, 2004 11:34 AM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)