Published since 1915 by the students
of Xavier University
Published since 1915 by the students
of Xavier University
— STAFF EDITORIAL —
The start of the new semester at Xavier University means many things, such as the start of fall sports, a huge spike in liquor store revenue and the office of the bursar collecting an enormous amount of money.
We pretty much accept that college is expensive and that in order to have good jobs in the future we need college degrees.
However, we must wonder exactly what we, or more accurately our parents, are paying for.
For example, one semester’s tuition for a full-time Xavier student taking 12-18 credits is $11,635. That’s a difficult number to wrap one’s head around, so in order to put it in perspective, we figured out what you pay per hour spent in a classroom.
We base this figure off a typical course load of 15 credits, with one credit roughly equaling 50 minutes spent in a classroom per week.
There are approximately fifteen weeks in a semester, meaning that the typical Xavier student spends roughly 188 hours in a classroom per semester.
Using these figures, Xavier students pay $61.88 per hour in a classroom, essentially one dollar per minute. So when you sleep in and miss a Monday class, you essentially blow 50 dollars.
Similarly, as nice as it may seem to have a professor cancel a Thursday class, the fact is that they basically wasted 75 dollars from everyone in the class.
It is interesting to consider what you pay for other activities on an hourly basis.
Movie theaters charge around eight dollars to be entertained for roughly two hours, baseball teams charge 15 dollars for bleacher seats to a three hour game and amphitheaters charge 30 dollars to see Journey perform a three hour set.
Meanwhile, Xavier University offers art history classes where students are charged 150 dollars to sit and be lectured on the artistic value of urinals for two and a half hours.
Obviously this is an extremely simplified analysis, perhaps overly so, as it fails to take into account outside help from the professor and other things of that nature.
A more concrete example of the enormous amount of money Xavier charges its beloved students is the “graduation fee,” which is exactly what it sounds like.
After charging you over $80,000 for four years worth of credits in order to be eligible to graduate, you’d think the bursar’s office would pick up the cost of the diploma and the graduation ceremony, but they slap you with a $50 fee to graduate.
Another great fee is the “student orientation fee.” This $175 one time payment covers your Manresa experience. Yes, I know that you are thinking, “Gosh, I only had to pay $175 to listen to some curly-haired guy named ‘Fro’ scream random and incoherent things about standing ovations? That’s a steal of a deal!”
The idea that college is necessary in order to get a good job is widely accepted at this point. However, a bachelor’s degree probably is not going to get you a job where you earn a dollar per minute. That’s what grad school is for.
Pat Stevenson
Asst. Op-Ed Editor
The Xavier bookstore is probably evil. This isn’t to say that the staff is evil. In fact, the bookstore offers some of the friendliest customer service of any business on campus.
What makes the Xavier bookstore evil is the faceless management. These are the people who take advantage of the relative hysteria that the beginning of semesters inevitably brings.
The frazzled Xavier student, overwhelmed by figuring out where his or her classes are, what he or she forgot to bring to the dorms and how best to establish relationships with members of the opposite gender, is too busy to realize that they just got mauled by the buzz saw of bookstore prices.
When I picture the management of the bookstore, the image I have is of Dr. Claw, the villain in the cartoon (not the crappy movie) “Inspector Gadget.”
When depicted in the cartoon, Dr. Claw always sat at his desk with his back turned. The viewer never got to see Dr. Claw’s face, we only saw him petting his (almost definitely evil) cat.
While Dr. Claw is a direct copy of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the chief villain in the early James Bond films, he provides an excellent mental image for the price-gouging bookstore management: faceless, evil and probably cat loving.
The way the bookstore does its business is not unlike the way in which concessions at sports arenas work. Concession companies essentially set their prices at whatever level they want, with the knowledge that people have no other alternative.
There is no scenario outside a stadium venue where I would be willing to spend ten dollars for a beer and a hotdog. However, inside stadium venues, concessionaires control all of the hotdogs and beer, and thus can charge whatever they wish. This is the basic principle of a monopoly.
While I suppose that what the bookstore does is completely legal, several of their practices seem to go against the spirit of economic competition and a free market economy.
stionable practices is the bookstore’s refusal to list the International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) of the required textbooks for certain classes.
With so many editions of so many textbooks out there, each edition of every book published is assigned a unique ISBN, making ISBNs the most effective and efficient way of identifying books.
The overwhelming majority of online booksellers, such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Buy.com identify their books by ISBNs.
So then, why would the bookstore fail to list such a standard and vital piece of information on the website? The most obvious explanation is that the bookstore wants to make it as difficult as possible for you, the student, to buy your books from an alternative, cheaper source.
Were the bookstore to list ISBNs, it would allow students to easily shop around for a better price on textbooks. As it stands, the only way to accurately figure out which books are required for which class is to order them online from the bookstore or to physically go into the bookstore and copy down the ISBNs yourself.
The bookstore does not have a monopoly on textbooks; rather, it has a monopoly on the information concerning which textbooks are required for which classes.
The blame for this problem does not lie within the bookstore itself, but rather with the university, for not giving its students easy access to the information regarding what books are required.
Clearly, the bookstore is not going to go out of its way to make it easier for students to buy textbooks at reasonable prices, since that would hurt their profit margins.
Why not cut out the price-gouging middleman altogether? Before the start of the semester, professors should send a mass email to the students in the class with the ISBNs of the books required for class, allowing students to shop around for the best value.
Matthew Finger
Op-Ed Editor
Soupie’s is gone. I know, it’s sad. It’s like a little piece of Xavier died with that hole in the wall bar/grille/dance club’s liquor license. There are enough memories left behind on that dirty, dirty floor to fill The Great American Ballpark (probably better than the Reds can).
What are us students to do, as we find ourselves cold, alone, and slightly buzzed, yearning to hear “Living on a Prayer” while drinking strange shots from a green test tube, all the while dirty dancing with that one girl in our philosophy class?
All we can really do is reflect upon what Soupie’s gave us. They say that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Well, Soupie’s was everyone’s trash, but it was everyone’s treasure, too.
To begin with, that fine establishment we knew only as Soupie’s brought us stories. A plethora of stories, to be exact. If I had a nickel for every time someone told a story about their night at Soupie’s over Saturday morning brunch, I would have quite a few nickels.
For the city of Norwood, Soupie’s must have been a Godsend. Not only was it a thriving business in what is a dying community, but Soupie’s surely provided the Norwood Police Department with countless dollars in underage drinking, drunk-in-public, and unruly behavior fines.
Xavier itself has lost a very valuable commodity in Soupie’s. Frankly put, where will all the students go? Dana’s and the Woods are 21 and up, and there is rarely any dancing (not to imply that Xavier students drink). Where will we go when we need a quick dance break to free our minds from our rigorous studies?
Also, how will upperclassmen and freshmen meet and mingle? Soupie’s was a melting pot for the university, creating a stress-free environment where the different levels of our social hierarchy could finally make contact.
Now, segregation will take over the university. Seniors will simply scoff at freshmen, knowing that now they have no reason to speak with the runts of the litter. And the freshmen will stay in their dorm rooms, sipping on their Popov, wondering what could have been.
We all miss Soupie’s, and at the same time we don’t. Soupie’s was dirty. That’s the only way to put it, other than sketchy. But it was all we had. What Xavier really needs is a replacement, a Soupie’s: Part Dos, if you will.
We need some place with Hyde Park sanitation standards and a Soupie’s mentality, a clean place where students of every level of education can socialize outside the classroom, a hot spot where co-eds can show off their latest moves or just stand in the corner and do the sprinkler.
Of course, underage drinking is a major concern of both Xavier University and the local law enforcement, but who says that we need to drink to have fun? What we need is a place where we can go and just be students hanging out, having a good time.
Granted, drinking would make that even more fun, but at this point we have to take what we can get.
Matthew Finger
Op-Ed Editor
Moderation: something we’re all told to practice. Too much of a good thing can be bad, our mothers say. Drinking too much can kill you, driving too fast can kill you and eating too much can make you unhappy. So, if moderation is so important to us, why are we, as a society, shying away from political moderation?
It seems today that more and more extremists, both left and right wing, have forced their way into the political area. Recently Joseph Lieberman, a three time United States Senator, former vice presidential candidate and former presidential candidate, lost the Connecticut state primary elections to first time runner Ned Lamont. Why?
Simply put, because he is too moderate. He has been criticized for not being liberal enough, unlike Lamont. Lieberman, who voted in support of the Iraq war, leans too far right for the likes of many voting Connecticans.
But the Constitution State isn’t the only place staying left, or right, of the middle. The Bush campaign of 2004 took a very strong stance against abortion, whereas the Democratic candidate John Kerry was more moderate in his position, and we all know who won that election.
I still don’t understand why political moderation is becoming such a taboo stance. To me, it seems like more and more crazy left wing liberals are taking to the streets in an effort to criticize our troops, protest an already active administration or to try and save a tree or something.
Equally crazy conservatives stand on our college campuses waving Bibles, preaching fire and brimstone and condemning the women’s cross country team for wearing shorts.
What is going on? Why do people ask me if I’m a ‘liberal’ or a Republican? Can’t I be a moderate Democrat, or a liberal Republican or,God forbid, a Libertarian? Why do I have to choose one side or the other, and more importantly why do my politicians?
I think that my senator should be able to support U.S. troops in Iraq and still be pro-choice. Moreover, I would rather have a president who is close to the middle, where other options present themselves, rather than being so far left or right that the only choice our country has is to revert to isolationism or start a nuclear war.
Why restrict ourselves to absolutes? Why is being conservative or liberal the only way?
What we as a society need to do is to stop the continuing trend of political extremism and move back toward the middle.
Our nation was founded on compromises; why can’t we take our forefather’s lead and meet in the middle?
Matthew Finger
Op-Ed Editor
Pat Stevenson
Asst. Op-Ed Editor
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