I am an in-state student at what is considered to be an affordable college, and yet, I will spend many, many years paying off the debt. I can’t help but wonder, wouldn’t it also be more efficient to shift the cost off of college students? The cost of higher education has exploded in the last […]

In a perfect world with unlimited medicine and medical personnel, healthcare would be free to both patient and government alike. Not a single person will be surprised to hear that we do not live in a perfect world. So, we have to engage in a sort of policy triage to decide how we will treat […]

No one wants to take your guns. It’s your property, and assuming you don’t pose a threat to anyone, no one minds you keeping it. That said, we really, really need to talk about gun safety in general and assault weapons in particular, and that’s easier said than done. There is no formal definition of […]

Coming from a working-class South Dakota town, I am very money conscious. So, like most people in this country, I find our national debt and growing deficit upsetting. However, as a college student, I am well aware that sometimes one needs to take on debt as an investment on the future. So, looking at the […]

I believe “Dreamers,” or the beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, are every bit as American as myself, and deserve to be treated with dignity. Perhaps our nation’s perpetual partisanship is making me cynical, but if there’s one thing that surprises me about Dreamers, it’s the wide support felt by many citizens […]

I’m not a journalist, I haven’t taken a journalism class since I was in high school and my only real qualification to talk about journalistic ethics is that I read the news a lot. However, this means I’m roughly as qualified to comment on the firing of Bill O’Reilly from Fox News as he was to be […]

I am a straight, white, Lutheran man who grew up in a small South Dakota town where the population of 800 was almost entirely white Protestants. In Whitewood, diversity meant having French ancestry instead of only German and Norwegian. This reflects a fundamental issue in my life’s education leading to my time in college: I had […]

In his 2009 movie The Invention of Lying, British actor Ricky Gervais summed up the average useage of Pepsi with the parody slogan: Pepsi, when they don’t have Coke. This is obviously meant as a joke, but it probably would’ve stirred more positive feelings than Pepsi’s recent ad featuring Kendall Jenner. For those who haven’t seen […]

  Imagine a world where any person can graduate high school and get a job. Not a job at McDonald’s – a job that pays people well enough to live on. A job with a company people can and will spend their lives at. This vision is a romantic expression of the American dream, but […]