College has never been easy for students, but with tuition rising each passing year, it seems as if the college years have gone from being a fun time to being more of a monetary exchange.

With this years’ 3 percent tuition raise, Grand Valley State University students are now paying between $160 and $180 more per semester than they were last year. That means that students are paying about 41 cents per minute to be in class. That also means that every time a student inevitably skips class, they’re wasting a little less than $25. 

While change is inevitable and the cost of tuition has always been high, there is a point where students are being treated less like students and more like profit centers. As an institution, GVSU should be asking itself whether the student body are mere customers, or students. Of the almost $295 million in tuition that is coming into GVSU, there has to be at least one area where savings could be made. Perhaps a good place to start would be the $5.6 million that’s being used for University Communications and Institutional Marketing. That’s a whole lot of money just for public relations.

The pressure is mounting higher and higher to borrow or pay more money as the tuition rates increase, adding to the ever-present worry and stress that students experience anyway. Rather than taking in the college experience and having fun, students are being racked with debt at the expense of getting a degree. 

College should be the most transformative years of a student’s life, a time that they dedicate to learning and bettering themselves, rather than spending day in and day out worrying about their next payment deadline. 

For most students, however, that’s simply not an option. A select handful have parents who will shoulder the heavy load of tuition, but for the majority of students, this is nothing but a pipe dream. For these students, the oft-repeated joke of paying for a degree to get a well-paying job to pay off student loans ceases to be humorous. It becomes real.

Entry level jobs for the vast majority of GVSU graduates will not come close to paying 41 cents per minute (roughly $25 per hour). Those enrolled in university know the dark promise of student debt is looming in the future. But, as tuition increases, it may be time for those heading into the college years to rethink their investment in higher education.

The only way for students to find sanity in the storm of their tuition bills is to decide that college is more than just a monetary exchange, tuition dollars in return for a job. In order to justify the chunk of change students give to GVSU, they must determine that college is an investment in themselves – bettering their lives for the rest of their existence. 

It’s time students change how they think of their time at college; they aren’t paying customers at a restaurant, they’re students looking to gain knowledge. That kind of self-improvement is going to be expensive and time-consuming, but if students sit in class counting 41 cents for each minute they sit there, they’re going to make themselves miserable. 

**Editor’s note: an earlier version of this article represented the $5.6 million for public relations as being used only by University Communications. The University Communications budget alone is $1.8 million. Combined with $3.8 million for Institutional Marketing, the public relations total is $5.6 million.