Bribe money is difficult to get together.

I’m looking into donating plasma, auctioning off my possessions on eBay – even giving up drinking. Even then, I’m not sure if I can get together enough cash to bribe my way into the required courses for my major next year.

Since I’m technically a junior, my first eligible day to register for classes was Nov. 9. I planned my schedule in advance, figured out what classes I needed, made sure it wouldn’t conflict with my job schedule and set my alarm for 6:45 a.m.

After that refreshing three hours of REM, I signed into TRACS to discover that the only open classes left were Basic News Writing and Tethered Swimming. As a journalism major, I’m required to have a double major or a minor, and maybe it’s so I had something to fall back on after I finished my string of profanity.

Is there a trick to this? I mean, I’ve only been here for a semester. Maybe there’s a “Don’t Get Shafted Form” I’m supposed to fill out. I was pretty tired during orientation. I could have missed that part.

I get that you don’t need as many seats in the higher-level classes as you do in the introductory ones. Dropouts, major-switching, and general idiocy are to be expected at any level of school.

But is it too much to ask that an average student with years of school under his belt, who didn’t procrastinate at all, be allowed to register for the classes he needs?

You don’t need to be a business major to understand that supply isn’t meeting demand. If it’s a question of space, go ahead and move the class to that useless Convocation Center my tuition pays for. Move it to the football stadium, for all I care.

If it’s a question of not having enough teachers, I’ll handle the introductory courses for you. I’ll just ask the class who follows the news, and flunk anyone who doesn’t raise his or her hand. That should separate the wheat from the chaff pretty fast.

Right now, a friend of mine is a journalism graduate student trying to land an internship with a newspaper. A question that pops up at every interview – the question that almost blocked him from his graduate program altogether – is, “If you’re so interested in journalism, why were you an English major in college?”

It’s because your chances of getting into the journalism class you want or need are about the same as my chances with Natalie Portman. So my friend traded in a useful major that’s near-impossible to nail down for an easy-to-schedule major that’s borderline useless for his intended career. With scenarios like that playing out, one could almost jump to the conclusion that the school doesn’t care about our education and just wants our money.

Making sure your students get the classes they need isn’t some obscure pet project that can be tackled at leisure. It’s an essential function of this institution, and something that can damage people’s futures if it isn’t fixed quickly.

The powers that be better get this straightened out quickly, or at least give me a good reason why they can’t.