A college education is useful, but it is not a right. Yes, it is expensive to go to school, but charging more for tuition is not the way to cushion the blow to the middle class. With the current budget issues in Olympia and at the UW, lawmakers are looking for any way to fill the funding gap. A recent opinion article in the Seattle Times by Rep. Reuven Carlyle, D-Seattle, called for an increase in the tuition cap from 7 percent to 12 percent. He reasons that the increased income could be used to offer more aid to middle-class students.

Honestly, his reasoning isn’t awful — there are some families who can afford, easily, to pay twice the cost of a UW education and, if we force it, this money can be used by those who cannot easily afford a UW education. I believe, however, that Carlyle is making a case without any hard proof to back it up. Just how many families can easily afford to pay, and are there really enough to subsidize the middle class? I am skeptical.

Of course education is important, but Carlyle — and many others — fail to take into consideration that, as things are currently set up, a college education is not a right. You must apply, you must be accepted, you must find the money to pay for it. It makes no sense to increase access to education without increasing the number of faculty to provide it. The point of a university is not to provide a mediocre education to a large number of people, but an excellent education to a small group.

The modern university began in the medieval period with the creation of the University of Bologna in Italy and the University of Paris. At Bologna, students hired and paid for teachers themselves — more popular teachers had more students and therefore made more money. This system also gave the students the advantage of being in charge and making the decisions.

Though this model often put teachers at a disadvantage being, as they were, at the mercy and whim of their students, it also had a number of benefits. The faster students learned, the more quickly they could pass their examinations and earn their degrees — proficiency, not credit counts, mattered. Moreover, everyone wanted to be there and get the most out of the professor; I’m sure there were far fewer students sleeping in class than there are now.

I believe it is more important for students to be invested in their education than it is for them to simply have it. In relation to middle-class families, Carlyle argued: “As the situation exists today, these students and their families are caught in a horrible Catch 22: too wealthy to receive financial aid and too poor to comfortably afford college.” As a student who pays entirely for my own education, I have little sympathy for this argument. I believe that if you want to go to college, you should make sacrifices. You should know, in a very real way, what your education is worth.

I worry that raising the cost of tuition will scare lower-income students away from applying in the first place. It could make even a relatively affordable education seem even further out of reach for those of us who don’t want to be buried in debt for the rest of our lives.

Reach columnist Sarah Greenleaf at opinion@dailyuw.com.