Hindsight is 20/20

Anyone who has paid the horrendously overpriced amount for a football game ticket or applied for basketball tickets has met woes over the past few weeks.\nTo combat this, the IU Student Association has appointed an 11-member commission to explore increased ticket packages, free football tickets, and other sports-related initiatives that could benefit students.\n IU's answer to the Department of Homeland Security is conducting surveys, interviewing administrators and holding meetings to figure out the best ways to enhance students' experiences with IU athletics.\n Great! Wonderful. Now, how about using your hard work ethic and organizational prowess to benefit our education?\n It seems like a bit of a shame when our leading student organization is appointing a commission to discuss tickets. The elected individuals are our voice to the administration and lead the charge to take any action to make sure that we can get the best possible experience while attending college.\n And we would love to see the IUSA find more productive things to do with its time -- to come up with some ideas that go beyond increasing the amount of tickets we can receive during a season and luring in voters with a Corvette. Yet it seems like IUSA can't, and that is a right cause for a bit of worry.\nThe thing is … we would love to get more basketball tickets. And we can't think of any better ideas either.\nHas the very meaning of college become so focused on socialization, sporting events and parties that it has lost sight of its true purpose of higher learning? Have we sacrificed our right to a quality education for the sanctity of sport?\nWell … yes.\nIt seems like college has been redefined in the context of the basketball court rather than the lecture hall, and while we wholeheartedly support every athletic squad, we need to take issue with how much attention we devote to campus sports.\nWe're all guilty of it. Even this editorial board has keened for our party school ranking and basketball seats. Our social agendas dominate our scholarly schedules, forcing us to live weekend-to-weekend, slugging through painful classes in order to survive until Friday's debauchery. Maybe its pressure, boredom or bad professors, but education is taking a backseat to our higher priorities. We're placing basketball, parties and our social lives before our education because … well … why should we care?\nAnd that's the challenge we pose to the IUSA.\nInstead of just engaging in activities that can easily appease students, maybe it's time the IUSA really focused its efforts on figuring out why we're appointing commissions to fight for tickets rather than fighting for personal attention in the classroom, and why obtaining a good education just isn't in our vocabulary as much as it used to be.