On Monday, Penn State students were asked to walk out of their classes and attend a rally on the steps of Old Main in order to protest Tom Corbett’s proposal of a 50% education funding cut. According facebook over 800 students were supposed to be in attendance. There were only about 300 students and faculty on the steps of Old Main during this protest.
Eight hundred students is only one out of every 50 Penn State students. Only 2 percent of our student body cares enough about this budget cut to do the simple, non-committal action of clicking ‘attending’ on facebook. That’s sad. What’s even worse is that less than 300 students even showed up to the event.
So why is everyone in an up rage about the educational budget cut? It seems to me that if less than 300 out of over 40,000 care, this proposed budget cut isn’t really that big of a deal. If I was a legislator and heard about this walk out, where less than one percent of the student population showed up, I wouldn’t be too concerned that I was making the wrong choice.
That wasn’t the point of this protest. Students were trying to show the government that we care about our funding and that we need it, but this protest probably did the opposite. It showed that we don’t really care.
WE ARE… all talk.
Today in our small class, we had a decent amount of students raise their hands when asked if their Penn State experience could end if this proposed budget cut is passed. I love Penn State and I’m already struggling with the idea that freshman year is over and I’ll have to go home for the summer, but I get to come back next year. I don’t want tuition to go up, but whether it does or doesn’t, I’ll be back. I’ve heard many conversations about how students won’t be able to come back to Penn State if this is passed, but are there really only 300 of them? That’s what legislators saw on Monday.
If students want to do something about stopping the rise in tuition, then we have to do something about it. It’s called active citizenship, and we’ve all learned about it, yet it seems we’re still waiting to actually do it. Why?
They say college kids get stuck in their own bubble, which we do. This legislature affects our bubble, and we still aren’t acting.
Why weren’t you at the rally?
