A college campus is made up of a lot of moving parts: the physical buildings, the student organizations, and the diverse groups of people who come here. But the true foundation of any university ultimately comes down to two groups: the faculty and the staff. While professors (the faculty) handle the education piece so we as students are able to thrive academically, the staff–you know, the people who clean up after us, fix things in our dorms or apartment buildings, and make sure this campus is actually running smoothly–are often left unrecognized. They are the invisible backbone of our school.
So, have you ever wondered why our tuition keeps going up every single academic year, yet what we are receiving in return feels like the same or even worse? Or the fact that this school we rely on so much is actively pulling the rug out from under us behind closed doors?
Without any campus-wide emails, transparency, or student input, the administration has been planning massive, yet quiet, budget cuts. Who’s hit the hardest? Those very same staff members who keep our campus afloat. By the next academic year, 40 staff are quietly slated to lose their jobs. Planning to slash the jobs of the essential workers who maintain the foundation of our daily lives that happen on campus isn’t just a bad look; it’s a massive disrespect to the people who keep this institution functioning. We continuously pay more money, so how can our university justify lining up the exact people tasked with maintaining our campus for the chopping block?
The rumored reasoning behind these cuts is that the administration wants to free up the budget to hire more professors. While we can all agree that adding faculty is a positive step–we are short staffed academically–trading one essential group for another is NOT the answer nor is it a real solution. Our school cannot run without its staff members. If we lose that foundational support, the campus life we have right now will progressively worsen. There has to be another way to balance the budget, and the administration should be consulting the people who actively live here for 9 months out of the year: the students.
This disconnect between what the university sells us and what it actually does goes beyond financial cuts and looming staff cutoffs. Take a look at what our university promotes on tours, social media, and every other piece of promotional media: you will see the administration constantly showing off our high international student population. They love using diversity as a billboard to get prospective students interested in the school.
But once these international students actually get here, the promises they received and the support just disappear. There is a major lack of help when it comes to finding campus jobs, getting internships, or navigating life in a different country. It becomes painfully obvious that these students are being used more and more as a tactical marketing move rather than being treated as members of our community who need and DESERVE actual guidance. They are brought here to make the schools statistics look good, only to be left to fend for themselves.
If the administration expects us to pay more every academic year, we deserve to know where, exactly, that money is going. A university is supposed to be a community, not a corporation that’s main concern is what it looks like to the public. It is time for the school to stop hiding numbers. We need to know why our rising tuition is paying for a declining student life, which forty essential workers are going to be cut behind closed doors, and why our international peers are treated more as marketing tools than students. Until we are able to get real answers, we as students are being asked to pay a premium price for a university that is actively planning to deliver a substandard experience–and that is completely unacceptable.