On March 5, a little over 120 sleepy-eyed students gathered together outside of the Fine Arts Center to a breakfast of bagels and coffee kindly donated by the People’s Market.
From there they took three buses into Boston with other Massachusetts universities, colleges and community colleges for Student Advocacy Day. Student Advocacy Day is a day set aside to bring greater awareness to public education in the political sector and is one of the best opportunities for students to show their support for affordable education.
As bus leaders explained the day’s agenda and the coffee kicked in, enthusiasm for the day’s work superseded the sense of injustice every college student feels when they awake before 10 a.m. Bus leaders passed out packets of information, each with the name of a senator and representative in the Massachusetts legislature.
Excitement peaked when the buses arrived outside of the State House and the students from the University of Massachusetts joined the throng of over 600 other students and faculty from public institutions across the state as they packed the over-capacity Gardner Auditorium to hear Governor Deval Patrick speak about his upcoming budget plan. Patrick’s plan, if passed, would raise the income tax but lower the sales tax in order raise money to invest in education and transportation. This is important for UMass because the President of the University, Robert Caret, has promised to freeze tuition and fees for at least one year if the bill is passed. This would be a considerable boon for students considering that at UMass, the cost of studying and living on campus rose over $600 this year and almost $1,000 the year before.
Patrick’s speech was centered on generational responsibility and the need to invest in education in order to create a brighter future in Massachusetts. He reminded the student advocates to speak to their Representatives about the importance of this new plan. Many legislators are resistant to accept the plan because of the tax hike but Patrick pressed ahead, claiming that “taxes are the price of civilization” and emphasized keeping the “public” in public education.
After Patrick’s speech, advocates broke into groups based on the Senators and Representatives on their packets. Each student was matched with the Representative from their district so that it was clear that their constituents were invested in this issue.
They visited each office and spoke to their representative about two different “asks.” The first was that the money goes to teachers and professors. This showed the support students had for their professors and the solidarity between different aspects of education. The second “ask” was that the representative speak in support of the reinvestment in public education.
I had the fortune of speaking with Hunter Parent-Wetmore, one of the organizers of Advocacy Day for this year and MC for the presentations in Gardner Auditorium. A student who did everything “right” in the financial sense, he attended Bristol Community College before transferring via Mass Transfer, which allows students from community colleges to waive tuition, which for the 2012-2013 school year was $1,714, and receiving a Commonwealth College Scholarship. Despite this, he will still graduate with over $25,000 in debt.
He emphasized that the overwhelming display of support from students across the state was important to show the nation that the students of this generation are not the apathetic and financially irresponsible stereotypes that many perceive them to be. His enthusiasm is infectious when he speaks about education.
“I really believe education is the grand equalizer and if you get everyone educated everyone on the same playing field, we can elevate the entire society,” he said.
When asked how he reconciled the increase in taxes with the need for affordable and effective public education, he replied, “the money is going to go somewhere. Either we’re going to be paying it in our loan payments to Sallie Mae or it’s going back to the taxes. I would much rather have my money go to the state, go into helping students who are going to be my fellow neighbors, my bosses, the people working with me in the future.”
Education is one of the qualities that have set the United States apart from other countries. There has always been a strong emphasis on universal education – although the definition of “universal” has changed over time – as a requirement in a representative democracy and that emphasis has kept us at the peak of technological and scientific progress.
As the world grows more complex, the need for higher education offered by colleges and universities becomes increasingly important. The challenges of today’s world, the environment being the most notable, are multi-generational problems. Education is the bridge that will connect older generations to their predecessors and newer generations to a brighter future.
Robert Champagne is a Collegian contributor and can be reached at [email protected].
