Hundreds of students are losing their financial aid this semester with few options for getting it back.

Why? Because the government has apparently decided the best way to save a little money is to stop helping students who have a history of academic difficulty.

No, this isn’t a prank or joke. Under the new satisfactory academic progress (SAP) regulations, students who have withdrawn from too many classes or had too many low grades are no longer eligible for federal aid.

Sounds great on paper, right? Why keep offering aid to lazy students that keep quitting in the middle of classes, or party instead of studying and flunk?

The end of another semester is drawing near, and through all the stress of cramming for last-minute projects and finals, one glimmer of hope remains for students: book buyback.

Yes, it’s that glorious time of year where students can hurl their cussed textbooks at a smiling bookstore employee and then gleefully turn tail, knowing that they will never see that bloody algebra book again.

But it gets even better: Not only do you rid yourself of your semester-long burdens, you get paid to do so. What could be better than that?

Unfortunately, there is a catch.

Since the housing crash of 2009, Americans have slowly gotten used to living in a bad economy. We’ve gotten used to making hard decisions with a shrug, or a sigh of frustration, or a rant about how tight money is.

But yesterday, this was all brought home to my husband and me, as we made such a decision with tears.

Earlier this semester, we adopted a bull shepherd puppy from my parents. As a raving Tolkien fan, I named the rambunctious puppy Balrog.

This past week, Balrog came down with canine parvovirus, an illness that simultaneously starves, poisons, and dehydrates a dog. Parvo is extremely contagious, and has a high mortality rate.

To the editor:

I want to ask you, and the entire higher education community, to look ahead and start thinking more creatively–and with much greater urgency–about how to contain the spiraling costs of college and reduce the burden of student debt on our nation’s students.

The Administration has taken a number of important steps to reduce the net price that students and families have to pay to attend college and the amount of student debt that individuals take on. Over the last decade, the net price of college has risen nearly six percent a year, after inflation. Yet in the last three years–thanks largely to a dramatic expansion in federal aid and tax credits–net tuition and fees paid by students at two-year institutions and non-profit four-year institutions have actually declined in real terms.

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard about the Penn State scandal. You know, the one where the football team had an accused serial child molester, Jerry Sandusky, as an assistant coach for about 30 years. The one where prominent university staff such as the president, athletic director, and vice president of finance all knew about what was going on.

The one where all of them turned a blind eye to the entire situation and never once told police young boys were possibly being molested in their very own facilities.

The very same one that has the entire country second-guessing society as a whole, wondering how it was possible for an entire program to enable this behavior for so long. Whose fault is it, exactly? Is it the graduate assistant, Mike McQueary, who states in 2002 he witnessed Sandusky in the shower with a presumed 10-year-old boy and decided to wait a day to notify head coach Joe Paterno? Is it Paterno, who simply told his higher-ups and left it at that? Is it the AD, Tim Curley, and the Vice President of Finance and Business, Gary Schultz, who heard of multiple occurrences and never contacted police?

During the summer, football fans had to endure months of lockout news, gossip, and negotiations to a nauseating point. As I write this editorial, basketball fans are going through the same situation.

As we all know, the NFL owners and players solved their problems in time for the 2011 NFL season. Unfortunately, the NBA has not.

For NBA fans, the outlook is much more bleak than we ever thought it could be. In the back of everyone’s minds there was this glimmer of hope, the thought that the NBA owners and players would resolve their issues in time for the start of the season. They just had to, so you figured a deal would be struck no matter how bad the situation was.

Boy, were we wrong or what? The NBA has already canceled a month of the season and at the time this editorial was written, closure isn’t really near.

As I meet with students around the coffee shop, in the dining hall, or in the class that I am teaching, I often hear how helpful the faculty and staff are to students at OCCC.

One student, who drives a considerable distance to come to OCCC, told me that she is here because of the quality of the programs and the excellent faculty and staff. She went on to say that there are other colleges closer to her home than OCCC, but she prefers to come here.

Her comments spurred me to take this opportunity to express my appreciation to the hard-working faculty and staff at OCCC.

In the past few years, with increases in enrollment and no new financial resources from the state of Oklahoma, many faculty and staff willingly took on additional responsibilities to accommodate and serve the increased number of students at OCCC.

As a consumer, I wonder why people will make a choice, knowing that choice is bad for them. Why do people continue the use of a product knowing that the use of this one product causes 30 percent of the deaths each year in America alone? Simple: It is because of the addiction.

About 443,000 people in the U.S. die each year from illnesses related to tobacco use.

Smoking cigarettes kills more Americans than alcohol, car accidents, suicide, AIDS, homicide and illegal drugs combined, according to cancer.org.

Tobacco products are known killers in society. It doesn’t discriminate: Tobacco can kill anyone who uses the products. The products are more addicting than illegal drugs, according to cancer.org.

I know the harmful effects of cigarettes first hand. My mother was a smoker for 40 years, a pack a day. For most of her life she was as healthy as the next person, but that slowly started to change.

There’s something powerful about Americans exercising their First Amendment rights. That power has, for the last 39 days, flipped out America and the media.

On Sept. 17, the Occupy Wall Street movement began. Thousands have remained camped out in New York’s financial district.

These people call themselves the 99 percent, signifying the majority of Americans struggling whilst the 1 percent, aka Rich Uncle Pennybags over there twirling his mustache, purposely wreck the economy.

While there is a problem, is sitting down, not working and beating a drum the best way of going about fixing that problem?

Nobody can really answer that question. The problem is that America was founded upon hard work, perseverance, good protestant work ethic, and unfortunately, excess, indulgence, imperialism, and egocentrism.

What does Republican presidential hopeful Governor Rick Perry (R-Texas) have in common with Rhode Island, one of the bluest states in the U.S.? You could probably respond to that question with a million zingy one-liners, but the real answer is no joke: in-state tuition for illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and graduated from high school.

On Sept. 27, Rhode Island education officials voted to allow high school graduates who are in the country illegally to pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities.

That decision also has proved to be a hot button topic for Perry, who enacted a similar law in his home state of Texas in 2001.

On a recent campaign stop in Iowa, Perry defended his decision to support in-state tuition for illegal immigrants, saying paying less does not equal a “free ride” for illegals pursuing an education.

That may be true, but that doesn’t make it fair.