Our View: CU-Riverside Student Investment Proposal brings up need to innovate

As the editorial board of a student newspaper, we can confidently say that not everything we talk about in our daily budget meetings is… well, constructive. Just ask Opinion Editor Colleen McSweeney, who recently introduced us to www.cutespaw.com, a website with an infinite stream of cute animal pictures.

However, for Chris LoCascio, a junior at UC-Riverside and editor-in-chief of the university’s student newspaper, his idea to completely restructure the college’s financial model came from talks with his editorial board.

Their idea, entitled the UC Student Investment Proposal, would allow students to pay no upfront costs for their education, but instead agree to pay 5 percent of their income to the university for the 20 years following their college graduation. For more details, see the front page Collegian article about the proposal.

“Rather than dealing with short-term issues, we wanted to develop a long-term fix for the system,” LoCascio said in a USA Today article last week. “Right now UC is living paycheck to paycheck with an unreliable donor.”

While the idea may seem a little off-the-wall or impossible to implement, the UC-Riverside system president Mark Yudof said he is actually looking into it, saying, “We think the ideas are constructive.”

As a university seeing problems similar to UC-Riverside’s — state cuts and tuition increases — we agree with Yudof. If you want to fix a flawed system, we think students should consider taking a page from LoCascio’s book by brainstorming, bringing up questions and looking for answers, even if you’re afraid your ideas may be shot down.