It is the goal of every university to produce successful and financially well-off graduates. To do this, universities must keep their enrollment consistent, which means retaining as many freshmen and first-year students as possible. However, these students can be tough to keep: research has shown 20 to 25 percent of NIU students drop out during or after their freshman year.

This is a trend administrators are trying to change. But based on my first year here, it’s safe to say that perhaps they’re looking to do this in the wrong places.

When I got here, I liked NIU right away – the people were nice, the classes were interesting and despite the unusually frequent car alarms and train whistles, the atmosphere had promise. And then I went to pay for my books.

Disheartening events began to snowball from there. With a bad taste in my mouth about the expense of textbooks, I then learned that although I paid a decent sum for the right to park on campus, there really wasn’t any room to park anyway. Then there was the inefficiency of the newly redesigned DuSable bus turnaround.

When second semester rolled around I discovered, as did many of my peers, there just weren’t enough classes available for us. Some students were forced to pay thousands of dollars a year for courses they didn’t even need, in hopes they could get into required ones at a later time.

I got a taste of what administrators and NIU officials meant when they spoke about “priorities.” Our football team’s success is clearly reflected in head coach Joe Novak’s salary, (which is far above the pay of many of NIU’s full-time professors) although, in a March 28 article in the Northern Star, President John Peters was quoted as saying “Accomplished professors aren’t paid what they should be.”

There was the renovation of the gleaming Altgeld Hall and the luxurious administrators’ offices – just blocks from the Stevens Building, which was reported last week to have a computer lab in a former janitor closet and problems with heating and mold. The building was not even constructed in accordance with the American Disabilities Act. And as I write this, the flooding in Cole Hall has caused one of my classes to be canceled.

Perhaps the low point of all this was discovering that summer commencement had been sold out from under us. That decision outraged hundreds of students, yet was made without any of their or faculty members’ consent.

My first year here at NIU has been a very, shall we say, enlightening experience. I have met some great people, been given valuable opportunities and enjoyed many of my classes. However, I would be lying if I said the general impression I’ve gotten so far didn’t make me feel, well, slightly unimportant. If administrators focused more on the issues that concern students and less on the potential to make money from them, they wouldn’t have to research why students don’t want to come back.

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.