At the beginning of November UW-Platteville hosted the System Student Representatives meeting. This happens four times a year and it is a chance for all the presidents and vice-presidents to gather and talk about the issues happening on each of our campuses. One of the issues that are always discussed is tuition, and at the last meeting some interesting ideas were discussed.  I don’t want to bore you with details. What it comes down to is this: money from the state goes down, your tuition goes up.

You are probably asking yourself what this has to do with you? In the 1960s college students just like us organized and voiced their concerns about current events. They changed the mindset of an entire nation.  The politics of the ‘60s have nothing to do with what I’m trying to say now; the point is that we can make a difference and if we think otherwise we are selling ourselves short.

When you go home for Winterim talk to you parents and tell them how we are paying for 65 percent of the operating cost of this institution. Tell them that even though taxes and tuition are going up, the UW System is getting less money.

To borrow a line from one of my favorite movies:  “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”  We have failed to communicate to politicians how important our education is, we have failed to communicate that the current trend of cutting state dollars and raising tuition is not the way to provide education, we have failed to communicate to each other how much we value our educations. If we don’t fix our communication problem we are in danger of letting our entire education system fail.

Eli Caywood
Student Senate President