Our View

Situation:

Higher education funding does not keep up with the rise in costs and increased enrollment at universities.

Stance:

College students of Illinois should band together and protest like the 1,000 Chicago high school students did in September.

Nearly 1,000 Chicago high school students skipped class in early September and attempted to enroll in two North Shore schools to protest the financial disparity of Illinois public education.

This weekend marked the meeting of 12 students from New Trier High School and several South Side schools who participated in the walkout. The group is calling itself the Illinois Council of Students, and they want to work together to try and find resolutions to the public school funding situation that has been baffling lawmakers for years.

This is true activism. A monumental walkout was staged and communication among the leaders has lead to a challenge against our incoherent government.

Taking charge is what we lack in higher education. We must remember that our top administrators who are highly educated and experienced are burdened with the constant pressure of employment.

We don’t have to worry about losing our jobs because we’re the consumers and the taxpayers in this scenario.

Illinois college students should take example from these 1,000 high school students, and especially from those 12 kids who are taking on a complex financial catastrophe. Keep in mind these students are kids without a right to vote or a high school diploma to their names.

We are in complex college courses and some of us already have bachelor degrees. We have national notoriety with most of our state funded universities – University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign atop the list.

The college students of Illinois need to rise above the bureaucracy that’s bombarded our state officials and put our minds together on how to fix education in Illinois.

Eastern’s Student Action Team departs for Springfield early today to lobby for higher education funding, and it needs to start networking with other lobbyists to join efforts for a unified front because lobbying individually becomes inefficient at times.

Illinois legislators simply don’t care about education at any level. Let’s rise up and show them why they should change their minds: Chicago high school students did.