Essay On Pay To Play

The pay to play scheme can easily be considered as a grand events management and or fund raising scheme that educational institutions can make use of. Every year, there are numerous extracurricular activities going on in these institutions. And in those activities, there are students who often get discouraged from attending because of the dullness of the activities—a problem which is often caused by lack of funding. With the pay to play scheme, educational institutions or some smaller groups within them will have the ability to generate revenues which they can then use to improve their programs and along the process, significantly increase the number of students who attend them. This will later on lead to higher revenues for the institutions that manage the programs.
This is a good idea in general, but questions such as whether the government will support or approve of the implementation of these rather radical changes in financial policies among educational institutions, especially those that are funded by the government, will have to be answered. For now, we can see that there is a good chance that this will materialize in private educational institutions because of their higher level of autonomy. The approval of the implementation of this policy or scheme in public schools, on the other hand, can still be considered questionable because as far as the government and taxpayers are concerned, they are still the ones shouldering the bulk, if not the entire, budget for the maintenance of public schools and universities including all their activities and operations. In other words, they may rule out that public schools may not have an inherent need to pass this kind of policy because they are receiving their funds from the government after all.
We may consider this issue from the economic point of view, however, students are not taxpayers and their abilities should not be limited. According to state constitution, students have access to a free education which includes sports activities, artistic activities, etc. However, when the price will be set, while choosing the activity they will start thinking of it as something more important than it should be. Extracurricular activities exist in order to find what is a person talented in. It should not be a burden for a family. Even if the cost is symbolic, when there are five children in the family, this question becomes the aching one. What is more, students cannot solve this problem themselves, all they can do is just to wait and spend their time at home near the computer and parents start counting how much they increased their expenses when their children start enlisting into one and then another club, taking different amounts of money every time. Another point is that the pay to play system may evoke some inequality among students. Being a member of a baseball team or a cheerleader, or some drama club is a part increadibly important for teenagers. In case one year they come to school and find out that their parents cannot pay for that, the consequences will be frustrating. Such cases will multiply with the time as fees will probably rise. For sure, the problems that discussed above are solvable.
Considering the question in the scale of a school, we encounter even greater problems. As the research shows, those are suburban and rural areas where fees are charged for extracurricular activities. It displays the situation with funding. As those schools are small, the number of students is less, finding them is not always efficient. The idea of applying the pay to play system, there may not be reasonable as fees will be higher than in urban areas. Again, this is a local problem, not a global one, which may deny efficiency of the pay to play system. However, another point should be mentioned. The control that public schools will receive should be somehow limited as they may start chargin for more. School education includes much more that just a class, teacher and students. They also have student’s governments, newspapers, etc. Would they charge for that? This point should be clarified and by all means, misuse of the power given to local schools should be prevented.
The question may also be considered from the other perspective. Taking into consideration the fact that funding is never abundant, more funding would only foster the process of improvement. Extracurricular activities may turn from a hobby into profession. They help children to socialize, fight their complexes and perform better at school, which respectively leads to the conclusion that improving the quality of extracurricular activities will improve the quality of education. Public school will definitely receive more autonomy due to the fact that they will receive some profit and spend it on modernizing facilities and expanding the range of available activities. Moreover, local administration knows the demand and the amount of funding needed to satisfy it. The system would work efficiently in larger communities as well as in small ones. It will no doubt provoke public dissatisfaction at first, as all new reforms do while being implemented for the first time. However, it is possible to localize the system, in order to meet the requirements of a certain community. As it was mentioned before, the extracurricular activities are getting less popular due to the limited opportunities they can provide, thus, additional funding will create favorable conditions for the functioning of the extracurricular activities.
As much as we may talk about the faireness of the implemeting of the pay to play system, in case economic pressure becomes too high, extracurricular activities will fall into decay or diappear at all. The pay to play system in this case is a way out. Some argue that it is unfair to pay fees for those who do not participate. Alas, they do not realize how helpful it is to share the burden of fee into many parts, making it easier to pay for everyone. It would attract the attention of people and engage more and more students into those activities.
In summary, this can be a promising scheme to improve the quality of programs being held within educational institutions (i.e. private ones). After all, those programs and clubs are created for students and so students should be the ones who should receive the best benefits. The additional source of revenue, on the other hand, can be considered as a bonus benefit for the educational institution that produced the said pay to play programs and or activities.