We can understand why students are upset. Students leave with $30,000 of debt all while the state of Iowa makes double digit cuts in university funding. We feel your pain. Iowa State will probably increase tuition and fees for the 2012-2013 academic year by 3.2 percent. However, we think student ire is misplaced. There is a much stronger concern, one not limited to students, that affects alumni and Iowans alike.

Our education is poor. It doesn’t matter how much your degree costs when it’s valueless. About 66 percent of high school graduates attend college, and from those, 28 percent need to take remedial classes. Student engagement is at an all time low, which isn’t surprising since class sizes are continually raising. Classes bloated beyond four hundred students make engagement impossible.

Larger classes, less engagement and easier workloads are pandemic within education. Less than 50 percent of classes require 20 pages of writing in a semester. Less than 32 percent of classes require 40 pages of reading a week. Since 1960, the hours college students spent studying has been cut in half.

You may be a senior in the social sciences who’s never written a five page paper. Or, a third year engineer who can’t identify Newton’s three laws. These were things once required of a high school education. Freshmen, you may see departments merge, such as the department of philosophy and religious studies. You may see fewer professors available to teach courses. You may have fewer generic courses to take.

Poor quality of education is a concern for everybody. It’s the education of our citizens that will determine Iowa’s future. If regents and legislatures want to maintain the prosperity of Iowa they need to focus on the educational qualities of the state. If alumni want to maintain the prestige of their college, they need to maintain the quality of the universities.

Social security, public policy, civil organization, urban development, law, medicine, industry, it all is connected vitally to the quality of graduates from our public universities. Industries come to Iowa for employees, but only so long as we have them. Taxes are paid only as long as we have people and companies to pay them.

Right now there are fewer reasons for graduates to remain in Iowa or for prospective students to come here. Increased tuition affects students, but quality education affects everyone.

Tailor your argument to a concern that affects us all. In a poor economy tuition is a student problem. However, education fuels our economy, industry, corporations and our future. Quality education is a concern we all share and what we all need to focus on.