Georgetown sent students into an uproar when it announced that it was considering a third-year Leo’s meal plan requirement for students. There are many problems that would come out of this requirement, with overcrowding at Leo’s and financial troubles for the students among them. But while these are struggles that would likely affect all students, the brunt of the damage will be borne—yet again—by the class of 2017.
It’s as if the University is trying to tempt us with privileges just to take them away when it comes time to reach them. As a freshman, I remember being excited at the prospect of studying abroad fall semester and then having the freedom to return to an apartment or townhouse. Now, I have had to all but give up on studying abroad because it likely means that I would be placed in VCE for a third year running after returning from abroad. The University would essentially be penalizing me for studying abroad. A third consecutive year of dorm life is enough of a deterrent from studying abroad to keep me on campus. When students opposed the idea, the compromise offered by the university was to postpone the implementation of the policy one year so that, instead of affecting the class of 2016, it affected the following group of students.
It comes as no surprise that Georgetown Dining wants to expand its monopoly on food services starting with my class. I’ve spent almost a year and a half now waiting for when I get to cut the significant expense of a meal plan out of my budget—I would assume most of my classmates have as well.
Students should have the freedom to drop meal plans if they so choose, especially after spending two full years chained to Leo’s. Tuition is already a large enough burden on its own. With a 4 percent increase each year I have been here and financial aid resources that are still relatively finite, why force students into another financial obligation?
My financial aid package was cut even after I submitted paperwork showing that my household experienced a decline in income. If the school is providing less money, how can I be expected to pay even more than I anticipated to afford any meal plan?
So what new, unpopular rules will be enforced on the class of 2017? Is Georgetown going to close basketball ticket sales to us? Will the University force D.C. to push its federal drinking age up to 25 starting with our birth year? Will the housing office force us to wait another year for townhouses? These are unlikely, as well as absurd, but given the way the University has already made us the proverbial guinea pig for its experimental policies, it is impossible to know what is on and off the table.
All of this speaks to a broader point. The University, although a not-for-profit institution, is still run like a for-profit business, and these kinds of businesses need to listen to their investors. The biggest investors on the Hilltop are the students. Add up the total tuition bill for all students at Georgetown over four years and it blows Frank McCourt’s $100 million donation out of the water.
So why does the school keep making choices that do not reflect the best interest of an overwhelming majority of students? Expressing disagreement helps get student voices heard, but there must be a proper dialogue. The university needs a system of gauging student opinion by expanding its discussions with GUSA and the student body at large. Making big decisions that affect so many students with such little student input is incredibly misguided and leads to a lot of preventable unrest. I have hope that the school will give up its three-year meal plan requirement in the face of strong student opposition. Maybe eventually, the university will open up a dialogue with students and heed our requests. But just in case, I’ll be keeping a few moving boxes and suitcases in my room for when Georgetown forces me and the rest of the class of 2017 to go live on a satellite campus.
Could you be any more entitled and dramatic about your first-world, elite-university problems? Please try to have some perspective. I don’t support those policies either, but we’re not exactly being sent to live in a gulag just because—after studying abroad—we have to live in a dorm (I mean, the dorms are bad, but they’re not THAT bad). I agree that we should express our disagreement with these policies, but it might help if we didn’t come off as whiny, petulant brats in the process, as you do here.
I invite you to look the piece over again. This piece is expressing a typical first-person reaction that also satirizes and exaggerates the way students reacted. This satire is something that you seemed to overlook when you insulted my work as that of a “whiny, petulant brat.” There are obviously many, much worse problems out in the world and on campus alone. There has just been an odd coincidence of minor inconveniences that have been placed on the class of 2017, which I poke fun at as part of the broader idea that the school’s administrators need to improve their dialogue with students. I hope you can understand that after looking it over again.
Thank you for this well written piece. I completely agree that important decisions, which affect the entire student body should be put to vote by the general student population.
Thanks for the compliment! I don’t know if a vote would be necessary, but an improved dialogue definitely is.
Yeah, I know that was the idea of the piece. I just don’t think that the satire knocked it out of the park and so you come off as whiny instead of funny. Intent is different from success, but whatever floats your boat.
Had to have enough room to fit the real message. Sometimes exaggeration is just the best way to do it. I’ll admit the satire is blurred especially when first person is included. If illustrating the individual effects of a series of unpopular proposals is something you’d call “whining,” that’s up to you. The broader idea that the students are effectively controlling shareholders of this school and deserve to be treated as such is the real message and is what matters the most here. Thanks again for the interest in the piece.
Nice piece, don’t know why Georgetown’s treating us like guinea pigs