It’s everywhere: every channel you flip on, every bar you hit up on a Friday night, every chicken quesadilla you customize with everything on it except black olives, jalapeno peppers and tomatoes at the College-in-the-Woods Tex-Mex station. It seems nowadays that everywhere you turn, there is a reminder right around the corner waiting to just yell, “Did you forget? America is going through a recession!”
Like a kid whose smothering parents continually throw him “Teletubbies”-themed surprise birthday parties even though he is clearly old enough to know that having a television where your washboard abs should be is largely inaccurate, the constant coverage of the economy’s struggle (to no avail) has become habitual. However, what most students might not realize is that this nationwide catastrophe is hitting closer to home than they might have expected.
Students will find themselves hard-pressed to learn that the New York state budget cuts, as a result of the national financial crisis, are beginning to take a clearly visible effect, already seen by the suspension of the Discovery Program’s learning communities for fall 2009.
With Paterson already taking 90 percent of this semester’s tuition increase and planning to take 80 percent of next year’s, who knows what other programs will have to go.
As a state school, Binghamton University serves as a perfect example for public schools everywhere of the potential threat that this recession poses against affordable education.
Let’s face it. Why did any of us become a Bearcat? You didn’t come here because the campus was built with keen architectural ingenuity, or because the northern white cedars and white-tailed deer in the Nature Preserve remind you of the Bronx Zoo back home. You came here because it is a decent education with a decent price tag.
However, continued disappearance of programs and a higher number of applicants accepted to Binghamton who cite its affordability in comparison to other schools, will threaten the institution’s hard-earned reputation as a respectable place of learning. Already borderline capacity with roughly 11,000 undergraduates, I couldn’t imagine how a couple hundred more students would live together, especially with the growing number of students deciding to live on campus next semester. Any residential student’s nightmare is going to a college so overpopulated that forced tripling becomes a normal routine.
Binghamton needs to firmly hold its ground and maintain the number of acceptances status quo if it wants to preserve its name as the “Premier Public University.” Whether one wants to realize it or not, prestige is measured by rejection. By holding its numbers constant in response to the booming number of applicants, Binghamton will unintentionally become more prestigious.
You know the economy has got to suck horribly when even a best-value school is beginning to lose its value.