Four score and seven days ago – give or take a month or two – a group of fine upstanding pillars of the Guilford community met to decide your financial destiny. They called themselves the “Budget Committee.” If you were unlucky enough to find yourself in the Budget Committee meeting, or bored enough to attempt reading the article which covered it, you no doubt discovered that, after much deliberation, these fine individuals swarmed together at the mouth of a major river where they mauled and ate everything that moved, including infants, live cows and a full grown tree . oh wait I’m thinking of a piranha feeding frenzy.

Actually, you found in the article that the Budget Committee concluded (surprise!) that tuition was overdue for its annual raise. Sadly, the article which covered the Budget Committee meeting chose to stick to the facts instead of engaging in any kind of meaningful, wild accusations, and as a result you have once again missed the truth behind the tuition increases and settled for the spin that the liberal media feeds you.

Fear not, today’s article will clear away the clouds of confusion that the reader is no doubt engulfed in. It will shine a beacon of light on the truth behind the Budget Committee meeting. Guilford’s decision to raise tuition needs explaining and I’m here to do it. You can thank me by helping to pay off my college loans.
In order to understand the truth behind tuition increases we must first look at the major motivational factors underlying the Budget Committee’s decision. There are three of them.

First and most importantly, Kent Chabotar needs a new Lexus. Chabotar needs a Lexus because he only has two and because of our commitment to being middle of the pack. Of the 18 small liberal arts colleges with which Guilford likes to compare itself, 13 of their presidents have more than three Lexus cars. It would be a disgrace for our college if our president could not keep up with the Earlhams of this world simply because of stingy students.

The second justification for outrageously expensive education has to do with the current state of affairs in our nation’s economy. Under the current administration, the economy has exploded providing thousands of well-paid jobs in the men’s department at Kmart. Frankly, we are all making so damn much money selling Beefy Tees and cleaning up the vomit in aisle nine that we don’t know what to do with our bursting savings accounts. That said more people than ever can afford to pay for a Guilford education, and it is the position of the college that Guilford needs your money more than you do. This assumption is of course true.

The third factor motivating Guilford’s tuition hikes is escalation. Escalation as an official policy of the college is aimed at matching and surpassing Earlham College in sheer economic surplus. It is carried out on two fronts: fines and tuition. This year Guilford levied more money in fines than the entire Russian military spent on its arms race during the Cold War. In accordance with Guilford’s commitment to the Quaker testimony of Equality, the Chabotar administration has decided to increase tuition so that the non-fine revenue is equal to the fine revenue.

You are, no doubt, livid about increasing tuition rates. What you need to remember is that there is a bigger picture at stake here than a lifetime of debt. The college is stockpiling funds in order to achieve mutually assured middle-of-the-pack status or MAMOPS. We have taken the initiative, through levied fines and a tuition hike, to escalate our stockpiled funds status. It is now up to Earlham College to match our escalation so that we can escalate again next fiscal year.

In my opinion, the college needs to call for larger annual tuition raises than those of the recent budget committee meeting. Chabotar should buy a private jet and clear a landing strip in the woods. We need to show those Commie bastards at Earlham that we are here to stay. The only way to gain the upper hand in our current funds race is to milk the resources available to us. Students are just fat sacks of cash waiting to be pilfered, and if we don’t pilfer as hard and fast as we can, the terrorists will win.