Opinion: UNR student action just not cutting it

By: Jay Balagna

Monday, February 20, 2012 - 10:34 PM

Jay Balagna

We live in a country undergoing an identity crisis. At the same time most of my peers and I are coming of age, new terms like “falling out of the middle class” are entering our national lexicon.

Across the globe in Chile, a country I have grown familiar with, the middle class is widening to the point that it is nearly ready to pull the nation into the first world. While here at home debates questioning the value of higher education are emerging, its value is so accepted in Chile that tuition costs have become one of the largest political issues.

In the United States, the cost of public universities has risen so fast that economists have claimed it will be unaffordable for most people in about two decades. Meanwhile in Chile, the majority of citizens support a student movement calling for free higher education.

During the last year, I spent almost seven months there spread during two visits. In the second visit, I arrived at the tail end of what many were calling the Chilean Winter. An homage to the year’s Arab Spring, this movement was slightly less revolutionary but still anything but calm. Tuition costs there are among the highest in the world when related to average income and comparable with only the U.S. and a few select others.

In response to those high rates, thousands of Chilean students from private elementary schools to public high schools and the largest university in the country went on strike. They braved repressive police who caused injuries and, in a few instances, death and sacrificed a school year by taking over their campuses and living in them to prevent classes from continuing.

My girlfriend was among the students who chewed lemons in an attempt to guard against tear gas hurled at her by riot police. And when she asks me what students in the U.S. have done to protest our own skyrocketing education costs, I blush in shame. Yet another tuition hike will likely take affect next year without a whimper from those who will pay it.

I know our situations can’t be directly compared, but that wasn’t always the case. From Pell grants to G.I. Bills, we’ve tried in the past to make college affordable. Our very own University of Nevada, Reno owes its existence to a clause in the state Constitution also prohibiting tuition fees for residents. Sure, the state has found a legal way around that, and Nevada still has lower costs than most states, but the disregard for the original intent is clear.

Yet now that we find ourselves in a situation close to Chile’s, our response is anything but as proportional. This newspaper praised a student protest in Carson City a few years ago that attracted a pitiful few hundred students as a great success. Our student government now focuses heavily on timid ideas like student regents.

Student governments in Chile have a national body set up among them whose leaders win international attention and repeatedly meet with the presidential administration. Furthermore, they went to the meeting table only after bringing President Sebastián Piñera to his knees in the public eye.

We need to get involved in the decision-making in a bigger way than sending students in suits to meet with people who don’t respect them. Volunteering for campaigns for politicians that use our demographic to swing electoral votes is not effective, either. We need to mobilize in a way large enough to bring attention to the trend of skyrocketing education costs while it can still be reversed. And we need to show people quickly, while there is still a middle class of which to fall out.