Last October, at Campus Philly’s College Day on the Parkway, I was out pimping iPods and other Apple schwag for my fruity employer. The amount of Penn students there was rather lacking — with the exception of Penn students who were actually managing the event. Missy Eliot said it best, “we run this s**t.” What can I say, Penn owns.
I bring this up not to extol the virtues of Pennbut rather to prove, once again, the stupidity of Princeton kids. You see, in the course of my day pimping iPods, untold amounts of college students asked if they could have it for free. At first I wanted to respond to such a potent mix of banality and stupidity with one of the 8 ways to kill someone with an iPod (at Penn, murder is in vogue this season). After another few hundred times hearing “can I have it for free omg lololz,” I became desensitized and achieved a sense of zen-like calm. I calmly told them “yes you can have it for free—but there will be a $249 freeness fee” (what is frightening is that this almost worked).
Now take the same bad joke and multiply it by a factor of a thousand or so, and you have Princeton’s latest act of benevolence to its unfortunate denizens. Awash with cash (a virtue of starting off with more money to serve a smaller student body and not spending said funds on $2400 chairs), Princeton has moved to halt the inexorable upward spiral of tuition costs by announcing they would not be raising tuition for the next academic year. Bravo, Princeton!
Unfortunately, with this 0% increase in housing costs comes a jolting 19% increase for room and board (outrageous, Princetonians should move off campus! Oh, wait, they’re trapped in suburbia!). Needless to say, this “freeness fee” pretty much negates the whole point of trying to stem college costs. (it’s the stemming costs fee!) But it will earn Princeton some headlines anyway…
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