Column by David Rempfer

Let’s be perfectly honest here: Those signs cost a lot of money.

Let’s also choose to be a little bit visionary: It’s a great investment.

When new students are looking at a campus to consider whether or not to come, what are the draws? For the vast majority of them, it’s the campus they see on a tour and the statistics they read.

That’s it.

They get a presentation— a facade that does its best to both accurately summarize and permissibly glorify our campus. If UK truly envisions becoming a competitive collegiate institution, more is necessary than just helping accommodate students whose hometowns are less populous than our campus is — which the signs help to do.

UK needs to appeal to potential students who are talented and brilliant, enticing their enrollment and utilizing their intellectual capacity to birth big-name projects that bring UK renown on a national scale.

Yes, UK is chosen by many because of local preference, but the dream is that enrollment eventually becomes nationally sought, and at that point, things will begin to swing. Politicians redirect taxpayer money to UK, obtaining collegiate attachments to flaunt for better voter appeal come election time. Private business owners begin considering large donations for research funding, or even to get their names engraved on the side of a building at a “high-class university,” in the hopes of gaining fame by driving a stake into the pages of history with their name hung on it. Quality professors contemplate applications to UK despite the implications of taking slight pay cuts to come to be a part of something special — or, better than that, we could appeal to them with better offers as funding increases.

Furthermore, permit yourself a moment to linger in the realization that private-sector support is a monumental support amid a very, very short list of reasons your per-semester tuition is $4,000 instead of $10,000; as private-sector support rises, and thus as private-sector funding rises, we could even …

Oh yeah. Lower tuition. The only thing the Kernel’s reading body can all agree on.

A better facade to sell with, better faculty comes, better students come, better projects are birthed, better status gets attached to UK, better funding comes in, the facade and reality get better … The cycle goes on.

So, is $250,000 a lot for signs? Yes. Maybe too much? Perhaps. Am I saying that pretty signs mean an instant rise into being an amazing campus? Of course not — not by themselves.

But considering that this is a one-time charge of $8 per student to help make UK a good-looking campus for those with the power to make it great, it’s a fantastic investment. And when you consider that, as a student, you are already paying $60 of tuition each semester for a gym membership that half of you don’t use, $8 isn’t a lot.

Which means — as mind-blowing as it remains for me to type and for most of us to read — $250,000 isn’t a whole lot. Not with the long-term impact it could help to make.

Though a half-million dollar annual salary still leaves questions in my mind …