We’ve all heard about how college will bankrupt us deprived students and leave us four years poorer without any real life experience.
But according to the Associated Press, U.S. average university tuition is down for the first time in 30 years.
Time to celebrate being a few percentage points out of the hole, right?
Oh wait — that won’t work for LSU’s student body, especially the out-of-state group, because their non-resident fees rose 14 percent in the past year.
Maybe soon we’ll reach the part of the cycle where prices trend downward and students can finally afford to escape the world of higher education without promising their firstborn children to the government to pay off loans.
Probably not, though, because the same study showed the percentage students pay out of pocket has risen despite an overall tuition decrease.
This means either students and their families are richer and don’t need financial assistance, or grants and scholarships haven’t kept up with the 30-year trend of rising tuition.
I’m going to bet on the latter, because no one I’ve talked to lately has been at ease about their financial situation.
We’re all here anyway, though, wasting nonexistent money on throwaway classes to receive a piece of paper from a close-to-unaccredited University manipulated by a phantom governor.
That seems like a worthy cause.
Our new University President F. King Alexander even presented the AP study at the most recent Board of Supervisors meeting, but only chose to highlight the branches of the LSU program that displayed positive rankings.
His handout ignored all our shortcomings, and if the Board meetings aren’t for criticism and discussion of the University’s policy, when else are the bigwigs supposed to talk about it?
Apparently never.
Despite all this upper-level drama, there are still 30,000 of us enrolled here, racking up debt and — according to the national news cycle — wasting time.
Every other week, some syndicate publishes an article or column with the groundbreaking news that a four-year degree doesn’t mean as much as it used to back in the day, or that it isn’t worth the trouble.
I think they need to get off their high horses and look at the innovation happening on college campuses.
LSU specifically is doing a pretty great job for a state university with a huge undergraduate body, in spite of our various boards ignoring real issues and our lack of sufficient parking.
We’ve got students pairing up with professors to more deeply understand their fields, jobs that allow crash tests for real life and connections through alumni programs to help seek out internships and future jobs.
These are all undeniably positive parts of a college career. The perceived negatives of unmotivated college stereotypes wasting money and no immediate post-graduation job prospects turn this into a non-issue.
Our system is definitely broken, with the ever-inflating prices and so many hoops through which we need to jump to reach graduation day, but overall an undergraduate degree is still worth the four-year struggle.
So don’t drop out just yet. Appeal to our Board of Supervisors instead and ask them if they’re still turning a blind eye to all of the University’s failures.
You can help out future tigers and get a real-world education about bureaucracy at the same time.