I am the oldest of three siblings. My brother, Bryce, is a high school freshman. My sister, Emily, is an eighth-grader. They are very dissimilar. My brother loves playing sports and doesn’t really worry too much about school, while my sister is one of the most serious students I’ve ever met in my life, even though she’s only 13. They are similar in a few ways, however. They’re both bright, they’re both precocious and headstrong, and unless something drastic changes, they are never going to be able to afford to attend this University, even though we are Oregon residents.
I wish that I were exaggerating, but I’m not. My family makes enough to get by, but there was never enough to help pay for college, and that’s been an understanding between my parents and me since I started high school. The $28,373 I’ve paid in tuition fees has not been an easy sum to produce, but I have managed, the way most of us manage, by keeping my living expenses low and working part-time.
I thought the same would be possible for my brother and sister, but it’s probably not. If tuition increases as much as it has since I’ve been a student here, then assuming my brother goes to school here, he will graduate in 2018 having paid $54,213 for his education. My sister, in the class of 2019, will owe $59,309. That’s a grand total of $113,523. My brother and sister, together, will owe almost exactly 400 percent what I have paid.
Anyone can tell you that higher education needs help. You probably know it yourself. We are hurtling toward a system that excludes everyone but the wealthy, and the ASUO executive would have you believe that the answer lies in opposing the New Partnership.
Consider, for a moment, that everything ASUO President Amelie Rousseau and the Oregon Student Association is saying is true: The New Partnership will privatize the University, and the only way to keep tuition low is to lobby our legislators. Now look at those figures I gave you again. In our current system, that is what will happen if nothing changes. Yet the OSA has probably been to your classroom to tell you it has succeeded before, and that the New Partnership will only take control away from students.
In response to their claims of success, I will let you decide whether you define our runaway tuition increases as success or not. The allegation that the New Partnership privatizes the University is an outright lie, however; one that has been propagated by people from OSA and people from the ASUO. In a letter to the editor, Rousseau and OSA president Mario Parker-Milligan wrote the following: “Make no mistake: The New Partnership is an attempt to privatize our state’s largest public university while requiring the public to fund that privatization with $800 million in bonds.” Again, this is not true. Rousseau used her title as “our representative” to purposefully mislead the students she claims to serve.
The New Partnership would create a $1.6 billion endowment that the University would use to generate revenue instead of receiving biennial allocations from the state. The Board of Governors charged with overseeing the University’s funding would be made up of 15 people, the majority of whom would be appointed by the Oregon governor and approved by the state legislature; additionally, one of those 15 would be a student, and another, a faculty member.
If you recall high school government class, there is another body that is appointed by an executive and approved by the legislature: the Supreme Court. Is the Supreme Court private? No. Also, if there is a student on this Board of Governors, that means a University student would have direct control over our tuition, instead of a legislature that has proven for nearly a decade that it does not care about the impending catastrophe facing Oregon students.
I care. I have younger siblings. I have a family that cannot support their aspirations toward higher education. And, regrettably, I have an ASUO executive that would rather attempt to deceive me into supporting the status quo than do something to fix it.
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