Thursday, Nov. 12 brought with it a country-wide march at 110 college institutions. With all of the other marches, stand-ins, shouting and unrest happening on college campuses nowadays, the average person could be forgiven for not noticing this particular movement. Nevertheless, this could be the movement which has the most direct impact on students at this point in time.
According to their website, The Million Student March (MSM) is a group of “high school, college, and graduate students, recent graduates, campus workers, former students, parents, and grandparents uniting … to demand tuition-free public college, cancellation of all student debt, and a $15/hr minimum wage for all campus workers.”
Clearly, if any one of these three demands were ever conceded by public officials, it would be a huge deal to millions of students enrolled in colleges in the U.S. But does MSM actually think it can enact these changes by chanting through the walkways of Texas State University, shouting (admittedly catchy) cadences at the top of their lungs in the student union of UMass Amherst and jumping around outside of Campbell Hall at UC Santa Barbara?
This group doesn’t even share ideas about how to meet their demands. MSM simply demands for things to be different. Nowhere on their website are there any real solutions on how to enact said change other than an 18-page how-to-organize-a-march guide.
So, Million Student March, here is my message to you:
I am a college student at a public institution. I am double majoring in finance and marketing with a minor in hospitality management. I go to an out-of-state school, and my student loan debt has already begun incurring interest. I would love to not pay any of my debt back. I would love to not have to pay for my last year of education. And I would love to see campus workers make more money (although my finance major makes me hesitate at this universal $15 minimum wage).
However, as a sensible person who likes to think and provide actual solutions when I disagree with how things are going (you’ll excuse me for not organizing a march), I have a problem with the way your movement is acting.
If you would like to parade around a college campus, holding learning hostage while making your demands, then I suppose you have every constitutional right to.
But maybe, just maybe, you could offer ways to actually achieve your goals.
I’ll even help you get started: What if more and more public colleges offered free open-courseware systems (akin to Yale, MIT and UC Berkeley) where students could watch actual lectures from professors at those schools and then teach themselves? After self-mastering the material they could (for a significantly cheaper amount than enrolling in a class) take an AP/IB style test to prove their proficiency (most schools already do this with foreign language and math placement tests). Certainly this would help with the cost of college.
Simultaneously, what if we allowed some services on campus (such as health fees, fitness center fees, etc.) to be privatized so that only those people who use these services paid for them? On a wide enough scale, this could help trim student debt.
You see, I do think you all are fighting a noble battle, that these issues are very important to our country and that we should not just accept high tuition costs and student debt as the status quo. We should never accept anything on the basis of thinking that “it’s just the way it is.” In fact, we should always want to make things better.
But we shouldn’t just complain about it and rely on someone else to make the changes for us. We should combine our complaints with actual answers for the good of all, not just the good of few.