LSU is at the epicenter of the heated political push to reduce the state education budget. If you haven't been living under a rock and have seen the multitude of emails from the university, it's clear that our chief legislators are not supporting higher-level education with the same force that they were just a few years ago.

As a student, my opinion is a bit biased towards being able to receive an affordable education and provide myself a future. However, it would only be fair to explore the options that present themselves without the help of the Louisiana state government.

Do away with professors

Learning has always been facilitated through old, wise figureheads that have earned several pieces of paper from other professors over the years. Isn't this entire process a bit redundant?

The brains at Harvard and MIT have been giving a joint effort to produce an artificial intelligence system capable of grading college-level essays. Stylistic patterns, grammar and structure of a paper can be analyzed and put on a numerical scale in the same way that a Scantron can be scored through a machine in seconds. If you thought that campaigning your composition professor's office hours was hard enough already, good luck arguing your grade that was spit out from a formula. Some may call it scary to believe that our departments could be run without any human input; I call it cost-effective.

Get rid of courses entirely

With less funding, there have been talks of removing course options in the near future. That may sound absurd. What about students who are already enrolled? Should they be forced to no longer pursue their degree because the state deems those courses non-essential?

The answer is yes. Leave it up to the same powers that consider education over-funded to also decide which careers our state's students should pursue.

Shut the whole thing down

Since the inexplicable cycle of cutting education funding across the country began, plenty of public schools have had to shut down from the primary level up to the university level. What if we did the same?

Louisiana could subsidize all of the deficits in healthcare and infrastructure by slashing public education institutions. There was a time where the great minds of the world had to seek out their own education through only libraries and their desire to learn. What could go wrong by taking away the tools that our future leaders—who are expected to solve budget crises like this one—are given?

Fund our students' education generously and allow them to pursue the career they choose to by investing in their futures

Let's not get carried away… There's an election coming up.