Last week, The Daily Reveille ran an article about the increase in students attending the University. Specifically, we saw a 14-percent increase in the number of freshmen here and a 3-percent increase in the overall number of students.
Despite a rise in the number of students, we have a reduced budget to accommodate them. Even if the number of students were to stay the same, we wouldn’t have enough cash to go around, so what happens if we lose money but get more students?
Well, the University is like any other organization — money is needed to make the wheels turn, and with money in short supply these days, the wheels are starting to squeak.
Whenever a business encounters a higher price to sell something, it usually cuts back on its supply. Why? Because it’s more expensive, so it doesn’t make as much money off the deal.
Imagine you and I go into business. I’m selling you the most refreshing, tasty, home-grown apples you’ve ever eaten. As soon as you see these plump reds, you can barely control the urge to slice a piece off and relax with friends and a cold glass of Mom’s iced tea. These are some good apples, and though they cost you $1 each from me, you turn the little gold nuggets over to lucky consumers for $3 a piece.
That’s a nice profit, friend.
Assuming you can turn over enough to make some decent cash, everything should go great, but what if I moved the cost up to $2.99, because hey, they’re great apples and they’re worth it?
Well, because I raised the prices on you, you can’t make any more cash off the deal, and now you don’t want to sell apples any more, at least not until people are willing to pay $6 an apple.
The University has a similar situation. When funding is cut off, the University can’t supply the same quality of education for the same price. So we either pay more, or the University needs to get more funding from somewhere else. The point is, when the University loses money, the quality of education decreases. Period.
Possible solutions? Well, we could pay higher tuition to try to keep the quality of our degree, and it has already happened in the form of the LA GRAD Act. Louisiana could increase funding to higher education, and thus the University, but that’s not going to happen.
Technology could help, too. If the University found a way to provide the same education at a lower price somehow, that would save us, like if we found a way to teach classes with robots or infuse calculus into beer, coffee and Jell-O shots.
Interestingly, you would think as the quality of the University’s classes and education in general worsened, fewer people would want to take classes here, and the price would balance out. It turns out that’s not the case at all.
If the recent 14-percent increase in freshmen is even a decently accurate indication of the students we’ll see in the next decade or so, then this is going to be quite interesting.
The University logistically only has room for so many students. If more students want to come in than we can fit, we have to sort them out somehow. Right now it’s a veritable Greek salad of ACT scores, GPAs, price, etc., but there’s a cap on how much we can charge for tuition, so our entrance ACT scores and other factors besides price have to increase.
See where this is going? In the next few years, the University is going to provide a lower and lower quality of education for its students, but because more people still want to get in, the entrance requirements are getting tougher and tougher each year.
The bottom line: 10 years from now, students will likely have to fight harder to get in, work with less than we did, pay more and will receive a worse degree for it.
Devin Graham is a 21-year-old business management senior from Prairieville. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_dgraham.
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Contact Devin Graham at [email protected].