You don’t have to look back far to see what strong student government association (SGA) leadership at MCCC looks like.
We’ve had some excellent SGA leaders in recent years, ones who served as genuine advocates for students, who made the needs of the 6,000 students their top priority, regardless of how many people actually voted in elections.
In 2022, President Christian Perez kept an eye on what the Board of Trustees was doing and saw that a tuition increase of 5% was being proposed, when the original proposal had been for 3%. He rallied dozens of students and got the Board to push it back down.
Perez told us, “I knew that I had to extend the message to all the student leaders that I possibly could because that was the only way to guarantee that somebody besides myself might show up and say something.”
2024 – 2025 SGA president Mirian Lopez worked to financially support students through concerted tabling and petitions, speaking out at public budget hearings, and legislative days. She got the NJ state budget to restore $20 million in proposed state-level cuts to community college funding.
This kind of leadership was what our students deserved this year when the college proposed and then approved a 10% tuition increase, the largest in 30 years.
Instead, no one was there to represent them at the meeting when the president informed students about what was coming and then when the Board of Trustees approved it.
The result? A combined $560,000 more in tuition and fees will be wrung out of full-time students during the upcoming year, and thousands more from part-time students.
The college says the increase is needed to keep the lights on, while students are struggling to keep their gas tanks full so they can get to class. Students are even more vulnerable to a rocky economy than institutions.
That vulnerability demands real advocates in student government. Too often, Perez says, the position attracts the wrong kind of ambition. “Instead of being a position for advocates to advocate, [student government] becomes a position for people to just kind of lean on and show off to employers, to other colleges. To scholarship, applications and so on and so forth,” he said.
All of the students on the Editorial Board of the VOICE are graduating, but we care about what comes next for our college. We devoted ourselves to it in the classroom, on the field, in the newsroom, and everywhere in between.
We want to pass on our legacy. Here’s what we hope to see from the next generation of student government leaders:
1. Hold elections like they matter. Promote them widely, invite competition. Don’t hand out positions like candy in internal selection processes that barely anyone knows about.
2. Make sure everyone knows who you are. You’ll have social media and the power of email blasts. Use it. Don’t hide hoping no one will ask anything of you.
3. Organize tables to sit with students. Learn their names, hear their concerns. Don’t lead from a distance.
4. Post your office hours and hold them. We’re not asking for perfection, just presence. Don’t retreat behind closed doors and inaccessibility.
5. Run useful meetings that mean something, especially with clubs. Show up prepared, stay engaged. Don’t rush through a ten minute agenda just to say you met.
6. Talk to the VOICE. Talk to the clubs, talk to the people you represent. Don’t disappear and evade us and call it leadership.
7. Ask students what they need. Crowdsource your ideas, and let the campus shape the agenda of what you advocate for. Don’t govern a community you’ve stopped listening to.
8. Take this position because you care. Show up hungry to change something. Don’t take the seat to fill a line on a résumé.
9. Stay through the end of the semester. See what you started through to the end. Don’t check out in March after applications are over like the job was never yours.
This is what MCCC’s students deserve at the very least. We learned this the hard way, by watching our representation fail.
But we’ve also seen what this college looks like when someone fights for it, when that someone decides the students come first. That person is out there, and we hope they’re reading this. We’re leaving now, but this college stays. Take care of it.
