The Nation has a great article up today about how students are being affected by cash-strapped colleges raising tuition, and what young people have been doing to fight for an affordable education. With states chipping away at their financial aid programs–or, if California’s Governor gets his way, terminating (get it?) them–and enacting cuts for higher education that are passed on to students as tuition and fee hikes, many students across the country share the student representative to the Tennessee Board of Regents’ sentiment:

“They’re treating us like we’re ATMs, not like we’re the future of this nation.”

The Nation’s article did a good job of laying out what is at stake in the struggle for college affordability:

College affordability is not just a student issue. It is about what kind of society we are going to have: one of well-educated citizens who are able to grapple with questions about the meaning of life and the existence of God, find cures for cancer, ease climate change and critique the powerful, or one in which ignorance and mediocrity are blandly, even cheerfully accepted. In Default, a movie-in-progress about student debt, a young woman says, “We’re just going to get stupider until there’s a change. We’re just going to get dumber.”

It also profiled the Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts (PHENOM)–a phenomenal (get it?) and newish group that, among other things, recently released a report about making Massachusetts’ community colleges free for all students.