At 7:31 a.m. on the KTLA Morning News, reporter Jennifer Gould was at Cal State Long Beach talking with Students for Quality Education members who'd been camped out since 5 p.m. Sunday to protest tuition and fee increases university board members may implement Tuesday afternoon.
To counter a $580 million systemwide deficit, the board is considering enrollment freezes at all 23 Cal State campuses and, after having already raised student fees 10 percent in May, increasing them another 20 percent to $4,026 annually, Gould reported.
Gould said many students already have up to three jobs on top of their course loads to pay for school now and that many may have to attend junior colleges or skip studies completely. Alex Castillo may be one of them. He told Gould that the proposed increases would add $1,000 annually to his education tab “which I really can't afford to pay that much.”
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It's refreshing to see co-eds committed to something other than hacky sack. Dumping crappy spending decisions on the backs of students is fucked. And sticking it to the university system is a right of passage on campuses.
Then again, how hard can scraping up another grand be? There is probably that much between the sofa cushions on frat row. What happened to good old fashioned student loans, which taught valuable lessons in fiscal restraint, personal responsibility and the grip financial institutions will have on one's soul for a lifetime.
And there's always to way to generate money that extends back to the days of Lewis and Clark: using that student loan money to buy and re-sell drugs. Just make sure your profits go to your education and not go up your nose, into your lungs or in your arm. It's the American Way!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.