College fees: Occupy Wall Street spreads to Harvard, UC Berkely

Mo Tarafa stood before students at a small, outdoor concrete auditorium at Florida International University and called for volunteers to sit in the 10 chairs before her. Each chair, she said, represented 10 per cent of the wealth in the United States and 10 per cent of the population. The students, mostly in their 20s and wearing jeans and T-shirts on a balmy autumn Thursday afternoon in Miami, took their places. Then Tarafa asked nine of the students to squeeze together into five of the chairs. This, she said, was the distribution of wealth in 1996. Next she asked nine students to fit into three of the chairs. This, she said, is the distribution of wealth today. “How are you all feeling right now?” she said. “Uncomfortable,” said one of the students piled up on one another. [caption id=“attachment_135221” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Protesters with tents gather on the plaza at Sproul Hall at the University of California Berkeley in Berkeley, California. Robert Galbraith/Reuters”]  [/caption] The exercise was part of a teach-in that took place recently at FIU and dozens of other campuses across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. As the protests have grown to cities across the United States, they’ve also taken root at US universities, where students have staged rallies and walk-outs from classes. On Thursday, students were among the thousands who took part in protests across the country. They’ve even set up their own tent cities: At the University of California, Berkeley, where 40 people were arrested in a violent confrontation with police last week, officers removed 20 tents on Thursday. At Harvard University, dozens of students have set up tents in the middle of campus. The students’ concerns: The rising costs of tuition, seemingly insurmountable student debt and weak job prospects issues unique to them, but which student organizers see as directly connected to the larger issues being raised by the Occupy protests against economic inequality. “I love my education. I think it was completely valuable; however, I feel I’m not using it on a daily basis,” said Natalia Abrams, 31, a recent University of California at Los Angeles graduate who has been helping organise students through Occupy Colleges, a loose coalition of universities across the country. “We didn’t go back to school to have USD 20,000 in debt to work at Starbucks.” AP