When I was a student and on the Government of the Student Body, I was on the ISU Student Fee and Tuition committee, which decides exactly what the title indicates. A couple years ago, CyRide came to us asking for a funding increase to hire more drivers and buy more buses, among other things. It was a reasonable request given the situation, as it was simply trying to keep up with the flood of people.

During that meeting, I became upset — not because CyRide was asking for more money but because they “had” to ask for more money. Just like this year and the year before, that year also heralded a wonderful, magical year of record enrollment by administrators. With no end in sight and infrastructure problems — that is, money problems ”— mounting, I asked Tom Hill directly when we could expect the university to stop beating every bush and scraping the bottom of every barrel, trying to find every loose student under the sun to enroll and what that enrollment cap was so that we could plan ahead for services like CyRide instead of trying to plug holes in the bursting dike with our fingers.

His answer? “When the students start complaining that the ‘student experience’ is suffering, we’ll slow enrollment.” That’s virtually an exact quote.

Well, newsflash: The so-called “student experience” is suffering, and there’s not a damned ISU student who doesn’t know it, even if he or she is a freshman. Packed buses, packed sidewalks, packed classes, packed library, packed residence halls, packed food court, packed everything. As a super-senior by credit hours, I had to pink slip into one or two classes my last year because they filled up nearly instantly upon opening. As I had enrollment seniority over most students on campus, that definitely shouldn’t have happened. And all this stuff has been getting worse the last several years and the Daily has been bitching about it the whole time, too, year after year.

So this isn’t about “when the student experience suffers,” as the day-to-day evidence clearly suggests. Like the robots in the Matrix using people as batteries, students are nothing but 35,000 bank accounts for the university to drain — and the more the better. Reality obviously demonstrates that the university doesn’t care about the “student experience” except when it comes to providing you entertainment and amenities to keep you fat, happy and distracted.

As long as you’ve got crap like Destination Iowa State to do and you can get an expensive coffee in a cute cup — after 20 minutes in line — who gives a damn if you can’t get across campus in a timely manner, can’t get into a class to begin with or have to wait for the fifth bus in the convoy — which is still packed — to get home.

So if students are really upset about this and want to do something other than merely complain about it for a change, the issue has to be made about making the university pay a financial or political price for admitting every kid with a pulse. If students want the university to stop enrolling so many students and begin to have admittance standards again, students need to talk to the following people and raise hell: the governor and lieutenant governor, their state representatives and senators in Des Moines and the members of the Board of Regents.

Furthermore, students need to get their friends and family to do it too — all people who pay tuition, pay taxes and who vote in the state of Iowa. Because if there’s one thing the university hates, it’s pressure from the state government. Iowa State is a public institution after all, and nobody likes oversight. So bring some oversight into the issue. Get enough people who vote and pay taxes complaining, and the oversight will appear as if by magic.

Whatever you do though, leave GSB out of it. They’re complicitous in the problem and have no authority to do anything about it anyway. They’ll just sell you more of the tired, worn-out platitudes about “working for students” to make you think they’ll take care of it and you don’t have to worry about it yourself. But really, in this context, “helping students” is just GSB code for “go away and stop rocking the boat because your independent, non-sanctioned involvement is a threat to our false, self-inflated authority.”

Students need to stop complaining and be responsible for their own situation, and do something about it. Otherwise, nothing is going to change and the Daily will get to keep writing this same editorial year in and year out.