October 12, 2009
by Yasamin Safarzadeh | Staff Writer
Recent articles from the LA Times depict how this economic downfall has left some schools hoping to compensate for the billions cut from education by trying to attain funding through giant corporations who, in exchange, plant copious products and advertisements throughout the campuses.
The financial hardships that City College is currently facing have negatively impacted students, faculty and staff alike. Times are looking to be even harder ahead.
If City College needs money, where is there to turn?
Some colleges, high schools and elementary schools have begun turning to big business corporations, such as Pepsi Co. and McDonalds, for funding. In exchange, the corporations get to barrage campuses with their products and advertisements.
However, many students, including myself, and parents, find these corporations threatening and exploiting our youth.
These, and other, corporations should be restricted within our schools, but if used correctly and without further influence of — or aggravation to — students, it may seem that the schools can find ways to take advantage of the corporations.
City College raises over $8 million in funding annually from donations, according to Mary Leland, director of the City College Foundation.
“We are quite transparent here,” Leland said as she handed me papers and charts regarding where each penny comes from, where it goes and where it is invested.
Leland said that the money from the school’s vending machines go to a program in which students can sign up to borrow the books they need for their classes during the semester.
I don’t support a more consumer-saturated youth culture than the one I see around me every day. City College students already have to swim through a barrage of corporate commercial floods.
Students of every age are bombarded with fast food marketing schemes like it is the necessity that will save their lives, and apparently their educations too.
In January 2008, students in the kindergarten to fifth-grade classes in schools in Seminole County, Fla. received their report cards in envelopes decorated with Ronald McDonald promising free Happy Meals to students with good grades, attendance or behavior.
It makes you think, “Come to school and win a burger.”
One thing the most obese country in the world doesn’t need is to have schools promoting fast food corporations preying on its children.
Fortunately, the McDonald design was quickly expelled from the schools, because of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and almost 2,000 parent complaints, according to the CCFC Web site.
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