It’s the beginning of May, which means the majority of students who will be living off campus next year have signed their leases and put down their deposits – making the final claim on their residences. This period also marks the beginning/near-middle of students’ reflections and comparisons on their deals, and as one Buckeye talks to the other, some are beginning to realize they signed over their souls to a slumlord for nine to 12 months.

Compounding the economic problems coming from the housing side of college finances, the article “Students work even harder” in Wednesday’s Lantern showed the number of hours students must work to pay for their education is increasing, paralleling increasing tuition costs. Many students who have had to up their working hours or even take on multiple jobs have a similar complaint: they work so much to pay for college that they can hardly do their college work.

All in all, economic burdens are bearing down on students from all ends, even including living costs – of which, some are exorbitantly high because of excesses (clothes, eating out, alcohol, to name a few). And between these mounting costs and many students’ inexperience in coping with finances and shopping thriftily, students are finding themselves working harder and compiling more debt.

The cure for all this is in the most unlikely of places – the heart of GEC complaints: Survey classes. Every college’s survey class, which is usually a one-credit-hour course, is meant to introduce students to college life, and more specifically, the general area in which their major is located.

Unfortunately, survey classes usually leave some students with complaints about having to do large amounts of mundane, pointless busy-work and attending hours of boring, information-deprived class every week – all for a single credit-hour.

Though the cure for this may increase the amount of work and class time, it would make a drastic increase in usefulness. Forget the survey class. OSU needs to create a life-skills class and make it mandatory for every incoming freshman.

A life-skills class could include a wide variety of skills beneficial to every student at some point in their future: Learning all the aspects of leases, and what fair prices are for off-campus housing; budgeting skills for living and excess expenses; learning information on gaining more scholarships and finding what loans are right for each individual student; learning schedule/GEC management. If it’s only going to be offered at one credit-hour, at least students will take more out of it than just the credit-hour.

Students and their parents pay thousands upon thousands of dollars to attend OSU every year, and these same people pay even more money because of various slip-ups, extra quarters needed because of poor scheduling and getting raw deals on housing. It’s time OSU actually gave us a GEC worth our tuition money – help students make a smoother transition into the real world.