What $5 gets you in a classroom discussion
University of Texas student Dan Treadway makes the mistake of calculating the cost per hour of his tuition:
As I sat in the back of the room in one of my classes and listened to a fellow student drone on about how her family's summer trip to the Ozarks somehow related to media theory, I let out a sigh. As she stumbled on her point about listening to Glen Beck on the radio while driving through Oklahoma, I pulled out my calculator and began doing a little math. Lets see, the cost for Fall tuition for my major was $4,646. Divide that by the four classes I'm taking, then divide that by the 27 class meetings in a semester. The number I came up with was $43.01. That was the amount of money I spent to attend that particular class session. Even more troubling, after prorating that number I realized that I was paying about $5 to listen to the girl conclude that Glen Beck was biased. My only solace was that I qualified for in-state tuition.
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