Laurier must uphold its small-scale status

If you want to be successful, you get some form of post-secondary education – we live in a society where this really isn’t a question. We’re brought up to believe that that’s just the way things work, and it’s different today than it was 25 or 50 years ago.

With the increasing necessity of post-secondary education in the workforce, Laurier has seen a rapid expansion in enrolment in the past few years.

Laurier – which is now a medium-sized school – is stuck with the reputation of being a small campus, and students who enrol here expect that Laurier will provide the sort of individual attention and closeness that other universities lack.

At large schools, such as the University of Toronto, it’s not unusual to have first-year classes made up of 500 students, which is why students from other schools may laugh at you when you complain about your “big” lecture of 100 people at Laurier.

Although Laurier is experiencing constraints, it is not the only school experiencing financial distress. Despite this, the bottom line is that Laurier has their small-school status to uphold – there is no substitute for a small class size and a professor who knows your name and marks your essay themselves.

Laurier, and the entire post-secondary system, needs to re-evaluate what they are providing students. University should be a place to learn, to get a quality education, to work hard and to get a valuable degree upon graduation.

But at the rate universities are growing, it seems that an undergraduate degree is simply a bunch of mass-scale, impersonal lecture halls where you only need to pay attention to the right things in order to check the right boxes on that Scantron card.