Check, Please... American College Students Demand Filet Mignon, Whine About the Bill

I have been meaning to write the “story of the average college student” for some time now, but the very issue of diversity – one customarily controversial, though in this context not affiliated with ethnicity – has kept me from doing so.

When it comes to the average American college student there is no uniform description; rather, college students hold a variety of characteristics that subsequently demands an impossible array of options from US colleges. And that makes us interesting. But it also makes us expensive, and that’s not something we’re willing to swallow. In a nutshell, we are not Europe.

Dr. Vance Fried was recently the guest on a radio interview in which he discussed the issue of US college tuition and why it is so much higher than that in European and other equally educationally developed countries. What Fried, a professor at Oklahoma State University, concluded is that we simply expect more than can be doled out free of charge.

College students are becoming more spread out from one another in our interests, desires, and endeavors to such an extent that we want more from our schools. We want botany and musical theater departments of equal quality, but we also want basement movie theaters and palace-like dorms. So schools give us these things, we're paying for them, and we are whining about the bill.

In fact, we have pressured colleges into making a competition of it. And that may be natural human instinct. But in demanding that our gyms and student centers be brand new we are indirectly asking for tuition hikes for the sake of top quality. We are making our schools mold to our increasingly diverse requests. And though not everyone asks for these amenities, we all pay for them somehow.

When put into the context of “faith in the millennials” to fix our economy and brighten the future from our top-notch educations, even President Obama is beginning to wonder if the extra bells and whistles are harmful to productivity. Not only do professors need to make money somehow, but we ought to spend less where it is excessive.

Could we do without this excess? Probably not. Surveys show that limiting athletic programs is just not in the cards for the improvement of the US higher education system. And as such it really is a double-edged sword. As much as I would like to see twice as many treadmills in my school’s gym, I would also like to pay tuition equal to that of the University of Avignon.