A Vision of Students Today

By Isela Reyes

The video that was posted on you tube, A Vision of Students today, is a very powerful video for all that watch it. Created by a professor in Kansas State and student contributions, this video speaks volumes about our educational system in colleges across the country.

Every year students pay an exorbitant tuition fee for just being able to go to class. And it seems as though every year that fee continues to grow, at least it feels that way here at Sacramento State. One of the notes that a student raised in the video that really stood out to me was how her neighbor in class pays these large tuition fees every semester, and yet this person never shows up in class to benefit from those dollars they are paying simply to sit in class. And the worst part about it to me is that students pay these fees to go to a school that has so many students enrolled, that the ratio from students to teachers is unbelievable. The student who wrote that her average class size is a whopping one hundred and fifteen, made me stop and really think about what we are paying for.

Like her, my classes are also very large, large enough that in half of my classes my teachers don’t even know their students names. Although I know in other classes that average is much lower, like the student who said that only eighteen percent of her teachers know her by name. These days, students are just faces in a crowd to our professors, and I’m not saying it’s their fault. On the contrary, how can you blame them when they get classes so large that it would take up a good portion of the semester just trying to learn all of their names? Some professors really try to know their students by name despite this. Like two of my professors this semester, whose classes were so large but they still wanted to be able to know us. So they brought in their cameras and asked to take our pictures and write our names under them just so that they can quickly get to know who is who in their classes.

One other thing that is very important is the purchase of textbooks. One student in the video said that he bought a hundred dollar textbook that he has yet to open. That is the one thing that bothers me the most after the high price we pay for tuition. When I first began school here at Sacramento State, I would by all of my books every semester so that I would be prepared with all the information that I would need to pass the class. Or that’s what I thought. Why else would our professors make us buy these books if they weren’t going to help us in school, right? Fast forward to the present and I am bitter about the fact that year after year, semester after semester I have spent hundreds of dollars on books that I rarely, if ever, used. I have a new method when it comes to books, I simply do not buy them unless by some miracle I actually have a professor who asks us to use our books to obtain information that they include in our tests. And you know what? I haven’t bought a single textbook this semester because I have yet to need or use them.

Why is this? We all need to stop and think about what is going on in our college campuses across the country. Why are students paying for an overpriced education in which they are forced to sit in overcrowded classrooms where their teachers will probably never know their name with an overpriced textbook that they will never use?