Another few blinks of an eye, and we're at Week 8! Pretty crazy stuff. Yesterday night, I enrolled in my classes for next quarter. It's a pretty stressful process, I must say, so I'm glad it's over...for another 10 weeks. And then the whole cycle starts up again....
Today, I wanted to talk about something that I'm very passionate about. It's an unbelievably important and significant topic: the price of higher education. Like so many other students, the cost of education has been rising consistently over the past decades, which is making higher education more and more inaccessible to many people. I have a very big problem with this, as I do not at all agree with the fact that education has become a huge privilege rather than a right, as a result of its absurd prices.
Anyway, I mean to be more specific. My blog post for today pertains only to the UC system. Let me give you a simple breakdown: last week, the UC Regents proposed a 5% tuition increase over the next 5 years, which will continue until the tuition for all UC schools (including graduate schools) has been increased by 27.7%.
As an out-of-state student at UCLA, I'm already paying WAY more than in-state students from California. OOS/International tuition fees are going to be EVEN higher. That's rising from around 35K to 41K, just to attend school here. I don't even think-- I KNOW that this price increase is absolutely absurd.
This doesn't just apply to us, the current students in the UC system. It applies to all future students who are interested in going to any school in the UC system, either for undergraduate or graduate school. So many more people are going to have EVEN larger struggles with student loans and paying off college debts.
Needless to say, the effects of this tuition increase are absolutely massive and awful in the long run.
The UC Regents, including Janet Napolitano, the head of the UC Regents Board, held a meeting at UC San Francisco on Wednesday to vote on this proposal. This is another issue because of the inaccessibility of UCSF. Although the UC Regents are supposed to bounce around from UC to UC, these meetings have been held here in SF for the past 5 years, because if they came here to SoCal, we'd probably be so good at protesting that they wouldn't be able to discuss anything without constant disruptions and rallies.
Anyways, UCLA held a protest last Tuesday, where we marched to all of the major parts of campus, chalked and flyer-ed the hell out of campus, and held a sit-in at Chancellor Block's office in order to demonstrate our discontent and anger over his approval for this tuition hike. I attended the protest and helped the chalking team write lots of big messages on walls and slabs of concrete the night before.
UCLA students weren't stopping there. To make their voices heard, they were traveling up to UCSF that Tuesday night to make it to San Francisco on Wednesday morning, just in time to join the student protests at UCSF with the rest of the UC schools.
We would be driving all through the night to make it in time, since the UC Regents purposefully made such a late public announcement about this meeting that it was extremely difficult to mobilize in time.
That Tuesday, I made a snap decision to join the UCLA delegation going to SF. This was such a great opportunity to raise my voice about something that I truly felt strongly about. Not only did I witness student activism in action, but I also wanted to be a part of it! I wanted to be able to say, "Yes. I took every opportunity that I could in college. I fought as hard as I could to create better opportunities for current and future students. Was I there in SF when students were protesting? Yes, in fact, I was!"
The only thing keeping me from immediately jumping on board was my Philosophy discussion at 10 am on Wednesday morning. After emailing her, my TA actually encouraged me to "go and fight the good fight", saying that she would be happy to fill me in once I got back! With this reassurance, I was officially cleared to go!
I emailed the USAC EVP office to reserve a spot, and then began rapidly making preparations for this trip from SoCal to NorCal. Thus, after my USAC meeting that night, I showered quickly, packed a backpack of essentials, and met the rest of the delegation at Kerckhoff Hall.
Let me just say this: Going to SF is no easy feat, my friends. I thought that we would be taking buses there, as the drive is around 6-7 hours long.
Well, there was the first caveat: we would be driving ourselves. In cars, like large SUVs.
Okay, so that's interesting...I guess I'll sign up to drive then! I have a license and I've been driving our family's SUVs for a number of years. If you need drivers, I'll volunteer as tribute!
Second caveat: You can drive, Melissa? GREAT! Here's the keys...to an 8-PERSON VAN. Go crazy, girl!
Hmmm....well I've never driven a van before. I've never driven in the state of California before. And we're doing this at night. Are we sure you want me to drive? Okay....?
.....and that's basically how it came to be that I ended up driving a massive white pedophile van with 6 other college students inside, from around 12:30 am to 4 am on California's lovely freeways. Hahaha. I'm very glad everyone in my van is alive and well. That's a rather large understatement.
So I drove over half of the way, and then a girl in our van from UCSD drove the rest of the way. She was...a less than stellar driver who thought it'd be fun to freak the hell out of me the whole time and play with her numerous braids while driving. Sometimes, she wouldn't even have her hands on the steering wheel, cause she was undoing a braid. Like, really??
Sorry for giving you multiple heart attacks right now, Mom. I'm okay, don't worry.
On the drive there, I got to know the people who had randomly jumped into my van. I was the only UCLA student, as well as the only first-year in our van. Everyone else was from UCSD or UC Irvine or a community college nearby. I was at first confused by why they were dedicating themselves to such an arduous student protest, but they later said grimly that they were planning on transferring to a UC school.
We stopped twice at gas stations on the drive over for snack and bathroom breaks. Once our van rolled into SF, then came the process of finding UCSF, which proved extremely difficult as well. It was freezing cold and raining, for one thing. Also, we had parked in the medical district of UCSF, which meant that we were NOWHERE near the Mission Bay campus, which was where the protest was being held.
It wasn't anyone's fault; we had simply driven to the address that we were given. However, it required me taking charge and asking business people walking by about how to get to the actual protest. We had to get on a shuttle, and then drive around 45 minutes to get to freaking Mission Bay. Not fun. At all.
So once we got our cold and tired little butts over to the rest of the crowds, it was finally time to protest. People were angry about this tuition increase, to say the least. Students from all UCs had come to protest.
There were a few problems though. First of all, a bunch of people deviated from the original plan that UCSA (The UC Students Association) had organized and set up, which made our presence a lot less effective. Instead of following a specific sequence to give public comment, then march, and then storm the building, a lot of people just went straight to storming the building, which is when a student got arrested and the police smashed a window trying to restore order.
Anyways, here's a brief summary of what happened: we stood in front of the building chanting for a while, with police men in riot gear staring back at us stoically. Then we broke off into smaller groups based on our individual UCs, and heard a lot of students raise their voices and make their opinions heard. Then, there was more chanting and protesting in front of a different entrance to the building, in which people got more riled up and heated.
Lunch (and breakfast as well for all of us starving protestors who hadn't eaten anything yet) was finally served around 1 pm. Fresh from the trunk of one of our UCLA cars, we had granola bars, bananas, water, an assortment of chips, and more granola bars. I was thankful for anything I could get my hands on; I was starved.
A kind person who was part of the protest ordered the largest pile of pizzas I've ever seen. Seriously. There were probably over 60 boxes of pizza. It was crazy. My friends and I found a dry sidewalk underneath a car garage to sit and eat our food like groveling homeless people. Since all of the building had locked down, there were no bathrooms or seats in the area that we could use. Thus, everyone found a random sidewalk or section of pavement and called it home for the next few hours.
As bad as our time at UCSF sounded, I had a lot of fun bonding with my friends during this time, and I'm truly glad that I went. My best friends from the SF trip became: Andrew and Chloe (fellow OP interns), Sanjana (Andrew's friend and fellow first-year), Tony (a fellow first-year), and Christine (a third-year). I really didn't have any attachment to the people in my van, since they were all UCSD or UCI students. Plus, they had dissed UCLA last night a few times before they realized that their (ahem), DRIVER, was a UCLA student. Bad move.
After lunch ended, we stayed for a few more hours before we headed out. By then, all of the news anchors had showed up and were interviewing students. It was great to watch other protestors make our case to local news channels.
The Berkeley group actually left first, on their coach bus, which is so ironic. They're supposed to be these effective, amazing protestors, and yet their supervisors actually told them that if they did anything stupid that got them in trouble, they wouldn't have a ride back to campus. And then they took off early before the Regents decision was actually released. Professional protestors? Really?
Eventually, everyone headed out after the decision was announced: the Regents (obviously) passed the proposal, 7-2. So it wasn't even close. Which is sad, but it's even sadder that I wasn't surprised by the decision. Time to go home, boys!
My group and I found the SUV (I was able to ditch the non-UCLA group, thank God) and then headed back. Tony and I got the trunk space to (kind of) stretch out and take naps. It was so interesting to drive back down to SoCal...I was able to really get a glimpse of the terrain here, which is so incredibly different from that of New England and what I'm used to. The amount of land here is immense. It's also so FLAT and brown. There were these massive hills on our right, that didn't have an inch of green-ness on it. Just windmills.
It was weird, I had this strange moment where I was just hit by the reality of the fact that I'm not nearly anywhere close to home right now. I am, and always have been, completely out of my element here. It hasn't been a bad thing, but it's just easy to forget sometimes when you're on campus at UCLA all the time.
Here, out on the freeway somewhere between SF and LA, I was finally reminded of this truth. And I was proud of myself for coming out here. It's been an amazing, trying, indescribable ride so far.
Well, we made it back to campus eventually, thank the Lord. I truly am thankful, from the bottom of my heart, for everyone making it to and from SF safely. There were a HUGE collection of things that could have gone wrong during the 7 hours of teenagers driving other teenagers. However, we all got back in one piece, which is incredibly important.
I'm so thankful for the memories and friends that I made, and I'm proud to be able to say that I did as much as I possibly could to stop the tuition increase from happening. It really is important, as it affects so many people.
ALSO, it is Thanksgiving today, so happy Thanksgiving, everyone!! I'm chilling in San Diego (first Thanksgiving away from my family! Hollah...) with some family friends. It was too short of a break and too expensive of plane tickets to go home for real, so I'm hanging out in San Diego and exploring a new part of SoCal for this year.
Not to worry though, I'm going home in like, 3 weeks anyways. So it really isn't all that bad. I'm excited to finally go home soon....it should be a crime to be separated from my cat for this long.
I'm thankful for so much. This year, especially, I think, because there's so much that has been going on. Honestly, it means so much to me that I'm at UCLA, able to take these amazing classes and pursue my dreams. Even though it may be difficult or stressful at times, I am blessed with the most amazing support system. My family and friends are more than I could ever ask for, and I have such an incredible community.
If any of you are reading this, I have so much love for all of you and I'm sorry I can't be with you this Thanksgiving, but I'm 100% there with you in spirit. Thank you for everything. I am so, so grateful.
Happy Thanksgiving <3
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