Quit bitching. Seriously, shut up. I am tired of hearing all of you Floridians complain about how bad the recent cuts in the Florida Bright Futures program are for you.
Put bluntly, most of you don't need or deserve Bright Futures, and is it not a grave injustice that you actually now have to take responsibility for your classes and pay for the ones you drop? Just ask Mommy or Daddy for a little extra spending money each week so you can still order your grande caramel macchiato from Starbucks every morning. Maybe it will keep you awake enough in that class you would otherwise drop.
To be fair, there are certainly students here that need Bright Futures to help pay their ways through college, but it is definitely not most of us here. In fact, the median income of a UF freshman's family in 2006 was more than $100,000. That certainly puts most of us here within range of paying the dirt-cheap tuition that the State of Florida asks of us each year, which is by far one of the cheapest in the nation.
Case in point, as an out-of-state student from Kansas who has Florida Prepaid (but not Bright Futures), it is less than half as expensive for me to attend UF as the University of Kansas. Simply put, even without Bright Futures, you all get the best education deal in the United States of America.
But what makes your whimpering about minor cuts in Bright Futures especially asinine is how ridiculously easy it is for you all to earn the scholarship. All you need to do is earn a weighted 3.0 GPA in high school and a 970 on the SAT. Translation: Stumble though high school without completely dropping the ball and be sure to fill out your name correctly on the day of the SAT.
My solution is radical, yet simple. And if anyone actually reads my columns, I will find out Monday morning when I wake up to a mountain of angry letters in response.
We should eliminate the Bright Futures program in its totality and make it an entirely need-based program.
I'm sorry, but if you can't pull a 970 on your SAT, you simply do not deserve to have the state pay for 75 percent (let alone any) of your already low college tuition. This program may have had noble aims in seeking to keep Florida's talented youth in state, but in the end it just ends up subsidizing the college tuition for the bottom rung of Florida's weak high school system.
I should also note that I do believe every qualified high school student should have the opportunity to attend a first-rate educational institution such as UF, but I am also sure that "qualified" is not a 3.0 and a 970 on the SAT. And I am even more certain that UF students do not have the right to weep over a few lost dollars in their already essentially free education. The Starbucks coffee you bought with that extra cash wasn't that good anyway. I promise.
Kyle Robisch is a political science and economics junior. His column appears on Thursdays.
