The participating activists were seeking to garner support before the 6:30 p.m. open meeting of the Board of Governors in the Rutgers Student Center Multipurpose Room. During this meeting, students are afforded the rare opportunity to address the Board of Governors (well, what portion of them decide to show up to hear from the students they’re representing) directly and voice their opinion on university money matters like meal plans, housing, and the notorious cost of tuition.

What the rally lacked in numbers it more than compensated for in passion. Current president of the Rutgers Student Union, Marios Athanasiou, was eager to explain why he was rallying for the cause, stating, “As far as I’m concerned, a tuition increase is a debt increase, and the tuition is already way too damn high. We have students who are struggling financially who are at Rutgers already as is, and we cannot afford to have another tuition increase that prevents more and more students from being part of this university.”

But the issue of affordable tuition runs deeper than the balancing act of increasing costs for higher education in the face of waning state financial support. David Bedford, secretary of the Rutgers Student Union, explains a Robert Reich-ian chain reaction related to high tuition costs, claiming, “Students are graduating with such enormous amounts of debt that we basically have a broken economy where no one can effectively remain part of the middle class, no one can put money into the economy because they can’t buy goods because they’re so focused on paying their debt and paying their rent. It’s hurting everyone, everywhere.” High tuition leads to more student loans which lead to larger amounts of prolonged debt which prevent college-educated citizens from making the very purchases necessary for supporting our economy. Something there reeks of unsustainability.

Of course, it is a well-known fact that each Rutgers graduate is going to be a millionaire, or at the very least marry one, and therefore taking out just one more student loan isn’t often perceived to be a threat to a financially stable future. However, the amount of time between tossing the mortarboard and stacking that first million or finalizing those pending nuptials might not be as short as we think. It might be in our best individual and collective interest to show our support in a protest rally or give a member of the Board of Governors a piece of our mind.

“Over the next couple of months,” Bedford says, “we’ve planned to wage a campaign against the Board of Governors, go out to their meetings, and testify in front of them because not until they see a significant amount of students will they start to recognize how deeply felt the issue is.”

The Board of Governors meeting that night was a rousing start to their siege. The turnout proved to be more than modest, with multiple organizations sitting in the audience in solidarity. Multiple student speakers shared their stories to illustrate personally how high tuition costs have affected their lives and made demands for increased transparency of university spending.

To avoid making the Board of Governors out to be an assembly of criminals, it’s important to note the following graph featuring New Jersey’s state appropriations to the university and how the cost of tuition relates to the rise and fall of those funds.

Source: http://budgetfacts.rutgers.edu/pdf/educ_chart_2013.pdf

Over the last 20 years, state funding as a share of the cost of a Rutgers education has fallen from 67.1% in 1990 to 32.2% in 2013. In 2012, state appropriations were at their lowest level since 2004, when Rutgers was a noticeably different institution and the student body was some 10,000 students smaller. Today, those appropriations makes up just 20.8% of the school’s total revenue — a serious problem to be sure, as the costs of providing a world-class education and top-notch amenities on campus continue to rise unhindered.

Students, in the face of these decreases in state support, have been forced to shoulder the cost of their own education. At each step, student tuition and fees has risen right alongside decreases in state appropriations, to the point where the two are now inversely related. In 1990, tuition as a share of the cost of a Rutgers education was just 32.9% — in 2013, it had rose to 67.8%. Likewise, by 2012, tuition had grown to encompass 36.2% of Rutgers’ total revenue.

Now consider what might happen if every student upset about the current cost of tuition showed up to the next meeting of the Board of Governors? How about half of them? A quarter? High Point Stadium would be a more appropriate venue for the meeting than the RSC Multipurpose Room. The voices of the thousands of students affected by this issue are not being heard in the numbers they ought to be, and putting faces to the statistics of those who will be paying off student loans for the rest of their natural born lives would do well to prevent RU tuition from continuing to rise.

That fantasy will probably take an indefinite while to materialize. Until it does, the comments Barchi made in Trenton in front of the state’s Senate Budget Committee on the same evening the rally and the Board of Governors meeting took place show that he is advocating for university undergraduates. To quote, “I believe we’re at a point where our undergraduates are paying as much as they can possibly do in tuition. We cannot continue to raise tuition to offset the lost support that we have.” Yes, those words were spoken by Dr. Robert Barchi, President of Rutgers University. Ahem?

You can read Barchi’s full testimony from the April 8 budget hearing below: