The Undergraduate Student Government wants to take students to Washington D.C. to lobby for higher education funding for Ohio.
Lindsay Stallings, the subcommittee director of Government Relations, said the idea of the trip came up last year when she was in the John Glenn Civic Leadership Council.
The hope is to start planning the trip this spring and have a group of students travel to D.C. sometime before the end of the 2011 academic year.
The trip would be available to any student interested in attending, but students would likely have to pay for costs such as hotel expenses.
Stallings said the trip is important for all students in Ohio, not just at Ohio State.
“We don’t have very good funding for higher education in Ohio. I feel as the largest and most centralized University in Ohio, it is our job to speak for all students,” Stallings said.
Stallings has also been making trips to the Ohio Statehouse to lobby for education funding. She is in the process of creating a pamphlet with Government Relations to help students find ways to get their opinions heard.
“I think it is important to lobby for better funding in Ohio because we do have a lot of really good universities that deserve funding to make it more affordable for students,” said Andrea Stitzlein, a junior in actuarial sciences.
Stitzlein also said middle-class students need more financial aid.
“The system needs to be better. A lot of the scholarships are need-based, so the students in the middle get screwed because the state believes that we can afford tuition without aid, when often times we can’t,” Stitzlein said.
Josh Zurn can be reached at [email protected].
