On Wednesday, about 300 Penn State students took a day trip to the state capitol, made a few speeches, posed for a few photos and left. Not much more was accomplished.

The point of Rally in the Rotunda is to convince state lawmakers to allocate more money for public higher education in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, this approach has done little to increase appropriations.

How could we blame the students who actually showed up? Only about 50 students from University Park even made the trip. Of the students at the commonwealth campuses and University Park, not even one percent of the student body traveled to the state capitol. How many students attend all the campuses? More than 70,000. It's good to see that about .4 percent of Penn State students care that tuition prices are gouging us every year. How can we blame the lawmakers in Harrisburg for not taking us seriously?

Let's say you live in one of the apartment towers downtown, and you also happen to love blaring music until 5 a.m. One day, .4 percent of the residents in the apartment tower knock on your door and ask you to keep it down because they have a big test the next day. Would you take them seriously? If we can mobilize students to move St. Patrick's Day, why can't we mobilize students to care about something important, like maybe thousands of dollars in tuition? "The Official Group to Move St. Patty's Day" on Facebook.com once had about 3,300 members. Yesterday the "Rally in the Rotunda 2007" group had a little more than 440 members. It seems a little lopsided, doesn't it?

What did our student government do to promote the Rally in the Rotunda this year? How many students even knew that there was a rally going on until they read about it in the Collegian? Where are the signs? Where are the UPUA members handing out flyers? Where are the Facebook invites or the e-mails. It's no wonder only an estimated 50 students from University Park went to Harrisburg -- no one had any idea it was going on. There is so much more that can be done to get students interested in the Rally. UPUA should be putting our tuition hikes in terms that students can understand. How much money is tuition raised each year? What else could we be doing with this money? Going on trips? Buying cars? Investing for our future?

Great things can be done when people band together. Look at the payraise scandal in our state government. Pennsylvania residents banded together in outrage and removed those individuals from office in the last election. We, as students, need some of that ambition to fix our current situation. We also need to learn from the poor turnout this year and last year and the years before. In relation to enrollment at our school, the amount of students attending the rally is embarrassing.