Prestige: The Answer to Our Woes

You knew it was coming. We, the graying masses of the School of General Studies, have flocked together to bray our way to financial aid parity with our brethren at Columbia College and the School of Engineering and Applied Science for once and for all.

Together, we shall barrage University President Lee Bollinger's office with e-mails. Martyred by our FAFSA forms, bedecked in the rags our pittances afford us, the great GS collectivity will transmute our collective coin lust into thousands-nay, millions-of eloquent appeals.

Each personally pecked missive shall cajole our president closer and closer to bringing an end to the appalling disparity lurking amid GS, CC, and SEAS. It is a matter of conscience. It is a question of our most basic human rights, of our dignity-because it is only then, with cash in hand, that we shall truly become Ivy Leaguers.

No, for real. Financial aid parity would be great, especially if it's retroactive. I'll accept my hundred-grand in cash, by money order or as a direct bribe to the admissions committees of all the grad schools I'm applying to. Maybe I'll endow a Lucky Jim professorship.

Too bad it'll never happen. Not like this. You see, beyond good sportsmanship, I can't think of a single reason why anyone would give us GSers free tuition. Thing is, despite the spectacular swelling of our endowment, Columbia is still strapped for cash. If I can't see an obvious reason to give a GSer aid, the University trustees definitely won't.

The trustees want to invest the endowment. It's obvious why Columbia College needs so much of it: it's locked in a U.S. News & World Report prestige death-match. It has to attract the best and brightest. There's an obvious return. The more money they put in, the higher CC climbs on the list. But all we GSers want, at least according to our Web site, is to "continue our stories."

Why would anyone pay for others to continue their stories? Hell, President Bollinger couldn't even be bothered to wear his academic garb to the GS matriculation ceremony when I transferred here in 2004-proof, if any, that we Owls rank low on any ducat-distribution list.

But it isn't their fault-it's ours. We need a better angle. We need to give them a reason to give us money. Letters whining about financial aid disparity just won't cut it. We have to stand out. We need to make noise and attract attention within the Columbia community and the world beyond. The only way GS is going to get any aid besides merit is if we bring our benefactors some sort of PR bang for their buck.

Columbia's public relations realm has three axes: expansion, social justice, and prestige. All are interconnected. Surely it's no coincidence that the board of trustees chose the protagonist of Grutter v. Bollinger to shepherd Columbia's expansion into Harlem without it looking like some KKK Klonvocation. President Bollinger epitomizes all three. He's the very embodiment of the wants of trustees.

If we don't expand, our University will wither and die, or worse, we'll be superseded by the University of Pennsylvania. But if we push too hard or get greedy with eminent domain or something, we'll spark another riot of '68, bugger our $4 billion fundraising campaign, and end up right back where we started. As for the uptown bug-out to come, they'll probably keep us in Lewisohn long after everyone else moves to their new Manhattanville digs.

Check out my picture-not a pretty sight. We GSers offer few cutesy photo ops. No sensible provost would try to deflect attention away from eminent domain by doling me out a four-year free ride when he or she could get blurbed in the Times by sponsoring some has-been from the Velvet Revolution or escalating the financial aid arms race with Harvard and Princeton.

Any money getting dispersed will be carefully vetted. It'd be too hard for us Owls to hone in on anything involving Columbia's reputation as a global beacon for social justice. We just aren't pretty enough or exciting enough to compete with the snazzier sections of the University in those realms. But there is one avenue where we can triumph-prestige.

More and more students are opting for a non-traditional education. Yet, for the time being, no popular indices of non-traditional colleges exist. Why don't we start one? We could rig the metrics of the thing so we'll always come out on top. Then it'd be easy to declare GS the most prestigious non-traditional school in the entire world.

We can put all of our resources into ensuring that GS students have the best placement rates in graduate and professional schools, dig up the best internships (for those of us who don't already have jobs), coax the best firms for on-campus recruiting, expand our joint-degree programs (why not a BA-MFA for us writing types?), and aggressively promote every flatulent-squeak alumni make once they've graduated. Then, when we demand that in order to attract the best quality applicants, the School of General Studies will have to have need-blind admissions or tuition remission, our administration will have to acquiesce.

But, regardless of what we GSers choose to do, we musn't bother Bollinger with our trifles. Not now. I hear he's jogging off to rescue some kitten stuck in a tree in Cambodia or something. Hey, wait, are my student loans paying for that?