God, I haven’t edited this blog in eons.
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Well, pre-finals week is upon us. Right now I’m up doing one out of my six (yes, 6) papers, four of which are due next week—one of which is supposed to be ten pages long, and which I HAVEN’T EVEN STARTED YET. Though, I must admit, ten-page papers are easier than people think. All you have to do is do five single-spaced pages, and then double-space them. Sigh. I guess it’s a psychological thing. ¯\(O_o)/¯
Speaking of school, the nearing prospect of paying off my student loans are increasingly encouraging me to take up alcoholism (kidding, kidding). At my university, tuition’s been going up by 3% per semester even since before I started attending. Yes, we’re a private school, and, yes, since we’re not funded by the state, we’re supposedly tuition-funded (tell that to all of the names of the donors immortalized in our sidewalks’ bricks), but, seriously? Seeing as how food prices have increased by 8% since my freshman year (last year), and as how I’ve only seen two new programs emerge since then, I don’t really know where it’s all going. Let’s do some math here. If every student paid, for purposes of accuracy, about $40,000.00 per year, during the year of my entry (2007) , and there existed a total student body of ≈4,000 individuals at that time (not including graduate students), the total undergraduate student tuition paid at the end of last year comes out to $160,000,000.00. If increased by 6% by the end of this year (likely, given the economy’s state)—factoring in the number of students leaving per semester for various reasons (for our purposes, let’s say 30 per semester) this total will increase to ≈$262.666.666.67 aggregate tuition paid by the student body at the end of this school year.
For the record, this isn’t that much. Harvard’s endowment (34 billion) just dropped by 22% (8 million), leaving it with only, roughly, six (6) billion dollars—78% of its endowment—left to use for 35% of its operating budget. Their tuition is about $46,000.00, and they’re cutting spending and programs. Ouch. The NBER said that the current “recession” started in 2007. Ouch again. In a world where Harvard University, the wealthiest university on Earth, has to cut spending and programs, where does the steadily increasing tuition of a school with an annual tuition of about $40,000 go? Development? Probably not. Self-sustainment? Necessarily.
Always thinking,
Hadid
