If there is one sentence I’ve heard more than any other during my first two years on campus, it would be this one: “The University just wants your money.” I’ve heard it from different people almost daily.

This sentence is often thrown around amidst the frustration of tuition costs, expensive parking tickets, the mandatory purchase of 300 Dining Dollars and other small administrative fees we might incur in the Student Services Center across from the Ferguson Center.

I recognize my bias as an optimist, but saying “the University just wants your money” is intellectually lazy. Barring any secret and large-scale embezzlement schemes I’m unaware of, the assertion that the University purely wants my money just doesn’t make logical sense.

It’s hard to imagine any organization purely wanting a single thing and because the “just” in the sentence is mainly a product of heat-of-the-moment frustration, I’ll argue the University doesn’t even mainly want our money.

First, there is no such thing as this abstract entity we call “The University of Alabama,” with goals and motives that exists apart from the individual employees that comprise its body. If we are going to assert that the University wants our money, we need to pinpoint exactly which employees we are referring to.

Chances are we’re not referring to our professors, dining hall employees, construction workers, custodial staff, police force, security guards or advisors, because they earn a salary, not a commission. At that, we’ve already eliminated about 95 percent of this “University” idea that just wants our money.

Just because an employee earns a salary, however, doesn’t disqualify that person from the potential motivation of mainly wanting our money. They could want our money in the sense that the amount of our money they bring in is the measuring stick by which they either keep or lose their job.

This is not the case, however, with the positions mentioned above. Professors retain or lose their job based on the effectiveness of their teaching.

In almost the exact same way, I can only assume that parking pass officials who work in the Student Services Center, the same ones we accuse of “only wanting our money,” retain or lose their jobs based on the competence and attitude with which they perform their administrative tasks, not by how many $10 transfer fees they can solicit.

All these positions’ measuring sticks are service, not revenue, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a time when giving better service equates to charging more money.

If anyone’s job specifications would specifically dictate that he or she focuses mainly on taking our money, it would be somebody in a high-ranking position, like the president.

If President Witt merely aspired to be a businessman, it would have been much easier for him to bypass the whole education system and go straight to Wall Street. Surely he’s smart enough.

Why would any aspiring university president who just wants our money go through the necessary years of graduate school and more graduate school, learn about complicated educational theories, spend years paying off school loans and forget about everything education-related he or she ever learned, only to become a money-driven president? What an odd occupational field and what a circuitous route for those goals.

A more plausible theory is that President Witt went through years of schooling because he actually cares about higher education.

Though the University (remember, we’re referring to specific individuals) might not want our money, it does need money. However, it doesn’t need our money.

We have a $535,305,247 endowment. One large donation from a faithful alumnus will cover all the $50 parking tickets you can possibly imagine.

Alumni donations also use quality, not revenue, as a measuring stick. An incredibly wealthy alumnus will be more likely to donate money to improve a College of Nursing facility because he or she has heard about the quality of teaching and success of the students in nursing classes than because they were able to charge a lot of students a pricey tuition.

Some universities with large enough endowments are even experimenting with free tuition because they simply don’t need it.

Granted some administrators might come from backgrounds in the business world, but in the end, both the way university jobs are paid and retained and the way the University secures big-ticket donations is such that it is highly unlikely the individuals working such jobs “just want our money.”

Maybe, just maybe, it’s the case that they “just care about our education.”

Ben Friedman is a sophomore majoring in social entrepreneurship. His column runs on Mondays.