by Allison Checkeye / Staff Writer

“Budget cuts” is a phrase you hear everyday around Pitt-Greensburg. It is the go-to, suitable-for-all-questions type of answer, which walks hand in hand with “the economy sucks”; if someone asks why an event got canceled, why the roof leaks, or why the flowers are dead, they will tell you “budget cuts.”

Yet we see no concern about dead flowers. Flowers wither in comparison to the various education programs which are taking budget cuts, and causing great agitation amongst students. Most recently, the English program got a budget cut, and without any announcement beforehand, resulted in the available writing Capstones being cut in half.

Not having a fall writing capstone course is a problem for seniors; students plan out, over the course of four years, which courses they will take so that they can have all the requirements met in order to graduate on time. Writing students who had planned to graduate in December 2009 are now facing a grim prospect: take off one semester, and resume college in Spring 2010, or get loans for an entire extra year of school.

Let’s get an idea of how much this will cost, assuming that students don’t want to take a semester off to let all of their knowledge leak out. We’re looking at $5,890 for tuition and Pitt-Greensburg fees for each semester, plus a frugal $250 for books, and then the added bonus of about a thousand in gasoline for commuters or way more for a dorm. That gets you up to at least $7,200. Peachy.

You may ask yourself, why wouldn’t the students just take a semester off? Surely they wouldn’t forget all that much knowledge in a couple months. Yet, some students will be pressured into being a full-time student in order to sustain grants and loans for the semester they do need to be here.

This type of inconvenience is absurd. The primary goal of attending college is to go to classes and graduate, so why should these budget cuts have to be taken from the greatest, and most important part of college life? Why not cut back SGA spending, some $80,000 a semester for events that most people don’t attend? Or perhaps we could cut back the $2.5 million remodeling project which inconveniences the whole campus and only benefits coaches and athletes.

Cutting the budget of our academic programs is a serious problem, one which despite Wes Jamison’s suggestion to “negotiate” with professors, isn’t going to be easily conquered. Even the best student-teacher relationship probably couldn’t tempt a professor to rock the English-department boat to accommodate a couple of writing majors.

All students, writing majors included, shouldn’t have to negotiate for the sole objective of their college education. In future, let’s hope that the necessary “limitations” to a small campus will be better thought out.