I just finished reading through an article in the New York Times about the sudden backlash that Virginia Tech is experiencing over the mass shooting that occured earlier this year, and I find myself (once again) wondering why people feel the need to point the finger when things like this happen.  Virginia Tech is a subject that makes me feel particularly vulnerable, mostly because it makes me wonder how safe I really am when I walk into a lecture hall on campus.  Despite this vulnerability, I don’t see how anyone can justify blaming the univeristy for what occurred there back in April.  You have to realize that it is extremely difficult to completely secure even a small area, let alone an entire open campus.  If people can still sneak bombs and weapons onto an airplane even with all the tax dollars pouring into airport security, I think it is safe to say that just about any student could bring a weapon to class without anyone knowing.  As for the warning signs that Cho (the VT shooter) displayed, perhaps the university could have picked up on the red flags.  The sad thing in all of this is that the university DID pick up on the disturbing signals that Cho was putting out, but were unable to do anything by law.  The beauty (or ugliness) of America is that you are free to do as you wish, including seeking mental help, couseling, or medication.  The university is not able to just force someone to see a doctor or take medication.  That would be a breach of civil liberties.  The list of people we can blame for what Cho did is endless.  His parents, the school system, the government, past doctors, his teasing classmates, and just about anyone who ever had any contact with him.  Really though, the only person that commonsense tells me we can blame is Cho himself.  He may have been mentally ill, but he was certainly in his right mind, certainly acted with intent, certainly knew what he was doing was wrong, and certainly meant to kill as many people as he could that day.  It just doesn’t serve any purpose to criticze Virginia Tech for failing on an impossible task.  Unless you are going to create an FBI-like task force to keep tabs on every student on every campus in America, we will never be able to prevent this kind of massacre from happening again.

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Today was a hectic day to say the least.  I have been up for close to 48 hours after pulling an all nighter last night in an attempt to catch up on all the reading for my Business Law exam today.  Since it’s an online course, I had to take the written exam with a test proctor who was convieniently working two hours away.  The one thing I love about long drives is the rare opportunity to just think.  No distractions, just pure, unadulterated thoughts.  I began thinking about politics, our nation, and the world, as is often the case.  When I approach politics, I try and brainstorm very unconventional ideas that fall outside of the norm, but all the while still appear not only feasible, but effective as well.  The reason for this out of the box approach is my unwavering opinion that our current policies and schools of thought are simply driving this nation in the opposite direction that we want to be moving. 

Over the last few decades, although it has been a trend of the century as a whole also, America has dug itself a hole.  We are too deep in debt to ever overcome it, and we consistently run a deficit in everything.  We continue to spend massive amounts of money on Medicare, the military, the prison system, environmental research, and just about anything else under the sun, but yet we still perform below expectations in each of those categories.  So how is it that we consistently perform poorly when we have that much government funding being pumped in?  Some would say that they are not receiving enough funding.  Even if this were the case, we can’t afford to push more money into these areas.  My personal opinion is that we are inefficient.  Money is being wasted on research when there are other alternatives. 

My proposal is simple, and though it may seem biased because of my demographic as a college student, I promise I will stand by this even 40 years into the future.  In order to improve our economy and society as a whole, our colleges need to be completely overhauled.  Right now, college is costing the average student somewhere around $5,000 a year.  This figure is inflated massively in the North East, where private schools are averaging $40,000.  As an out of state student at Penn State, I am paying about $20,000 a year, not counting the extra $5,000-$10,000 in room, board, and living expenses.  I think it’s safe to say that college is outrageously priced.  While the price tag does not discourage many students from attending college, it does affect the distribution of majors and what careers these graduates go into.  If you are planning on being close to $200,000 dollars in debt after college and grad school, you aren’t likely to choose a career path that is going to make you $50,000 a year.  The number of students going into law, medicine, and business are skyrocketing while we lose valuable brain power that could be going into the research fields that can’t compete salary-wise.  The proportion of students who go into environmental sciences and research global warming and new sources of fuel are going to be vastly outnumbered by high paid white collar workers. 

It is my theory that by improving the affordability of colleges, we will improve the efficiency of every aspect of our society.  I don’t think anyone will argue with the fact that educated populations are always more advanced and generally more successful than those with poor educational institutions.  Instead of becoming doctors, students could afford to pay off their loans easily by working a lower paying medical research position if they were only maybe $40,000 in debt after grad school.  These increase in medical research would lead to an increase in the quality of medical technology and care.  The same applies to the environmental fields. 

The major question here is how do we decrease the price of college so drastically for each student.  Even if you disagree with my theory, you probably at least agree that the cost of college is getting out of hand.  I don”t have an answer to the funding question, but I do have an approach.  Two years ago, my high school law class took a visit to Rahway Prison in Northern New Jersey.  On that visit, we were given a quick lesson on the history of facility.  While it is not the case anymore, Rahway had been a self-sufficient prison for most of its life span.  They funded the prision by having a world class wood shop, as well as operating a laundry service for 3 other prisons.  Those prisons would ship their laundry to Rahway and the prison would charge for the service.  Of course, they also rented out inmate labor to construction projects and other various tasks.  What if we were somehow able to apply this concept of self-sufficiency to universities.  I realize to think along the lines of renting out labor, since colleges are a bit different from prisons (massive understatement), but the might just be a way to create programs that carried a very large chunk of the college budget.  In order to kick-start these self-sufficiency programs, perhaps the new trend of states selling their toll roads to private companies would allow the states to put a billion or so into their respective state universities.  We should also skim a bit of the budget off other areas, like the ones mentioned before, in order to improve them this way. 

The underlying premise is that knowledge is power.  With a more educated workforce, our research would create cheaper alternatives thus relieving the budget.  It would take creativity to lower college costs, but perhaps it really is possible.  If the universities become successful enough in their self-sufficiency programs, they would fund their own research into the various issues we are so concerned about, effectively eliminating the need for much of the government research funding. 

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Colleges around the country are beginning to partner up with legal music providers in order to stem the rising tide of law suits issued by the music industry.  It makes sense that college students are among the demographic group most likely to download music, more often than not illegally.  For students, these partnerships are almost always a good thing.  At Penn State University, there has been an agreement with Napster for the past two years at least.  Penn State students are given access to Napster for the entire time they are a student at the university.  Statistics show that these agreements between music downloading companies like Napster are definitely cutting down on the amount that of law suits and letters that are sent to students. 

Let me start off by saying that I love Napster.  It is a great service, and something that I use at least once a day.  The download speeds are unbelievably fast, often approaching 450k.  They have an incredible collection of songs, most of which are free with the subscription.  Napster allows you to play streaming music instead of actually downloading the files as well.  Most of all, Napster has a really easy to use, organized interface that lets you navigate easily through the huge collection of music.  The only downside to Napster is that when you unsubscribe, all the song files that you have downloaded expire and become unusable.  This is especially hard to cope with if have amassed a large library, only to have it expire.  Fortunately, I have found a solution.  By using a program called Tunebyte, you are able to re-record the songs and effectively take the licensing software off, eliminating the need to re-download everything.  Of course, since there is no file sharing involved, you are safe from the law suits.  Napster is certainly worth the $10 a month subscription if you love music, and you fear the record companies.  If you aren’t worried about law suits, go right ahead and keep on using Limewire and Bittorrent. 

Breaking from the perfection of Napster is Ruckus. Ruckus is a service that Penn State has switched to for the upcoming school year.  A cheaper alternative to Napster, Ruckus offers its services to colleges for a much lower price.  The only problem is that it comes at a much lower quality.  The first time I logged onto the Ruckus website, I was horrified by the terrible navigation.  It is fairly difficult to get around the site.  Also, instead of coming with its own browsing program, all navigation must be done through the Ruckus website.  Ruckus forces users to download the music they want to listen to, which often clutters and fills hard drives, since it doesn’t offer streaming music like Napster does.  The songs expire just like Napster’s, but you can’t transfer the music to an IPod or other MP3 player like you can with Napster.  Overall, Ruckus is a step down from Napster.  Ruckus tries to entice us by offering full length movies for download, but you sign up and find out there are only about 10 movies available, all old and nothing too special.  

It’s really too bad that Penn State didn’t leave the choice up to the students.  They didn’t even cut our activity fee which is used to pay for these arrangements.  Instead they are spending that money else where.  I think that most students would agree that we would rather our money be going to Napster, a service that everyone loved.   

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