I find the notion of education as a privilege to be harmful, dangerous, elitist, and absurd. Your socioeconomic status should not bar you from higher education. Wanting to deprive people of their right to an affordable public higher education system is wanting to silence and blindfold people before bludgeoning them. When the people in power disregard the important role public higher education has on the country, it speaks volumes of the government’s fear toward a people armed by an education.

To keep us away from higher education is to keep us ignorant, dependent, silenced, and in poverty. When you strip us of our education, you strip us of our opportunities. Yet, the people in power can easily advance because an uneducated country won’t question what they do. They don’t research budgets, salaries, and laws. They don’t want us educated because they don’t want us asking questions – the people’s knowledge is the most frightful and powerful tool.

Taking away our education is taking away our rights. Our challenging the systems of power reduces them to petty behavior. They flee the country when protests erupt, they delegate our voices to be heard only by the lower ranks, and they do all in their power to silence us. But when they granted us freedom of speech and the right to protest, they promised us their ears when we had something to say. You wish to silence us because we have awoken to our reality and we demand change.

To want to deny us our right to education is the worst injustice made to an already suffering country. Without education, we have no work, no leaders, and no ideas. Suddenly we become an impoverished country full of ignorance and unable to move forward or to think for ourselves. While that’s highly convenient for the government, they are setting our country up for failure. Their people will be stagnant and the economy will collapse.

To deny us our education is to rip away from us our civility and our ability to debate and have an open dialogue. How are we to regard the system with respect when the system constantly disrespects us? We need an education because we need a source to sustain our livelihood. Mr. Rosello and members of the fiscal board – does it not fill you with shame to know you’re condemning the people you are supposed to look out for to be ignorant? Perhaps it doesn’t, because ignorant people don’t ask questions or criticize – they simply assent submissively to your whims and convenience.

By taking away our right to an affordable public higher education, you take away our aspirations, our prosperity, and our future. I stand with the University of Puerto Rico not as a student (which I am not) but because I believe my country deserves a chance, a choice, and a voice – and I cannot and will not allow the system to take that from them. I know the economic crisis is bad, but taking away all that money from the public University is condemning it to collapse and wanting to privatize the most populous 3 branches of the UPR system and cutting scholarships to those you deem able to pay (not taking into consideration the costs of transportation, food, housing, etc.) is unjust, cruel, and a denial to your people and mine to be able to make something of themselves in a country that has done all it can to make them think there’s no way out.