By the time this is published, students will have made their stand for higher education at the State Capitol Building, but the participation, or lack thereof, of those being most effected is cause for alarm.

For weeks, there has been an emphasis on the need for students to be engaged in the discussion on the fate of higher education. Students are the ones who stand the most to lose. There are reasons that the students of Nicholls State University decided to come to this school. Whether that be because of financial, academic, travel or other reasons, this University checked the boxes you needed to check in looking for an institution of higher learning.

If the Doomsday scenario of the state being forced to close or merge universities to make up for budget gaps happens, for the majority of this campus, it likely will not be easy for students to find somewhere else to earn a degree. For those of us further along in our studies, it would be pretty unsettling to be told the money you’ve spent to better yourself has been spent for nothing.

As far as we know, only 12 Nicholls students attended the protest in Baton Rouge. To say that only 12 students out of nearly 6,000 were able to clear their calendar to help the cry for higher education be heard is ridiculous.

It is understandable for a student to believe that it is difficult to adjust their week around something that is on a Wednesday in the middle of the day. We have classes and exams, things that are due, but outside of the tasks that cannot be moved to another day, there is no excuse for not taking a stand for your education. If you aren’t interested in fighting for that, you won’t have to worry about classes and exams if these budget cuts hit as hard as expected or worse.

We can get behind the latest trend or fad we are interested in and we can do the same for causes we believe are worth fighting for, but why are we not willing to fight for ourselves? This is not going to go away. As the saying goes, talk is cheap. It’s nothing for someone to say they are going to support the cause in other ways they have no intention on following through. We’d be better served sticking our heads in the sand and hoping the storm blows over without too much damage being done.

This is bystander apathy at its finest. Students are waiting for someone else to take up the banner for them. We’re all guilty of it. Unfortunately, there’s no one available to do that if we’re all waiting on the next person.