For those of us in college today, it seems the platform of higher education cost is spiraling upward, while at the same time, the ladder we climb to reach it is being shaken and hacked away.

Tuition costs at Iowa State have risen by more than 40 percent in the past two years, exemplifying a national trend. At many schools, tuition is rising at more than double the national inflation rate, and the consumer price index and out – of -state costs rival the U.S. per capita gross domestic product.

Students today must turn more than ever before to loans, and are thus graduating tens of thousands of dollars in debt. And thanks to the Bush-o-nomics of the past three years, those graduates are finding jobs scarce, and returning to school for a master’s degree and several thousand dollars more of debt as their best option.

The situation facing students in college today is not just business or politics as usual; it is social injustice. Thirty years ago this society decided college was necessary for everyone and has since tailored advancement around such education. And so as the university system stands now, we students and our parents are being forced to pay more than we can afford for something we cannot survive without — we are being fleeced.

When will we finally say enough is enough, throw down our beer cans and remote controls and start looking for a solution?

There is, of course, a solution. There is a way to reverse this trend, to stabilize that platform of higher education and to fortify our ladder to it. But that solution is not an easy one, and its best examples lie in places Americans are loathe to look: history and France. If we look back less than half a century, to Paris in 1968, we find injustices similar to our own and an effective means of overcoming them.

In March of 1968 French students, fed up with overcrowded classrooms, insufficient study space and, above all, restrictive co-habitation rules, protested against their university administrations. Throughout the spring they held sit-ins in women’s dorms, boycotted classes and demonstrated en masse. By May the demonstrations had escalated and during a protest at the Sorbonne in Paris on the third of that month, riots broke out. In the days following, all universities and high schools in France closed, and thousands of students marched through Paris and battled police. On May 10 the French government called for negotiations and met with the student movement’s most outspoken leader, a 23-year-old named Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Unable to reach an agreement, the talks broke down.

But as word of the student riots in Paris spread, workers across France spoke out in support of the students. On May 19, two million workers across France were on strike, and just three days after that nine million refused to work, bringing daily business to a standstill. A movement started by students for unrestricted access to women’s dorms ended with the largest labor strike in French history. By the end of the month, the government bowed to pressures and both students and laborers were back to work with newfound rights.

A great injustice, much greater than the one that brought about the events of May 1968 in France, is plaguing college students in the United States today. These rising tuition costs and diminishing government subsidies are driving us into debt and dimming our prospects for the future.

We must rally together, enlist the help of others left behind, demonstrate, march, boycott and protest until the government takes notice and shows it values education as much as it does war and Halliburton.

But could we do it? Could we organize 20,000 people in Ames? Could we empty classrooms from the University of Maine at Orono to the University of California at San Diego and fill the streets of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles? Could we inspire the blue-collar workers of this country to walk out of their factories and demand legislation that benefits them and not their bosses?

No, probably not.

Sadly, we’re too short-sighted, complacent, fat, lazy and drunk to make any real changes, too preoccupied with parties and beer bongs to care how we’re being mistreated. As our rights to affordable education are trampled, as our tuition skyrockets and our taxes are expropriated to oil fields in Iraq and the super-rich at home, we write letters to the editor about our rights to tailgate near the stadium.