With jobs becoming harder and harder to find in these harsh economic times, more people are looking to higher education to give them an edge in tomorrow’s job market.

This puts more pressure on colleges, impacted majors, campuses and enrollment.

It’s becoming easier to blame the school system for not getting into the classes one would want, but in the end it’s the students’  responsibility to pay attention to enrollment dates and even contact professors if they need a class.

Students must not only rely on the My Cerritos web site to do all the work for them.

We all know different groups get different enrollment dates that seem almost arbitrary and without reason, providing a handicap for certain students.

But what happened to contacting professors yourself and fighting for a class you didn’t get, maybe even on the same day you were allowed to enroll?

A simple e-mail may suffice if sent right when you realize that enrollment is outside your control after you tried everything you could.

Although a student’s enrollment date is one of the most uncontrollable hurdles in the way of his semester schedule, the largest problem seems to be students not making school their top priority.

Most of us don’t look for all of our classes until our enrollment date, but we can start to fill our schedules until the day we are able to click “proceed to step two of three” in our shopping carts.

The overpopulation of our campus makes it harder to receive direction as to what classes we should take next.

We’ve all experienced the long lines to see a counselor, and those who haven’t seem almost allergic to waiting more than an hour.

The fact remains that if we don’t wait in every line available to us to receive help, we cannot complain that the help is not available or that the system has failed us.

With so many students on campuses all across California, only the most proactive have the right to begin questioning the system.

Questions also arise when students face fees and get dropped from classes.

Ultimately, if we want to keep the classes we worked so hard to get in to in the first place, we must plan on paying the necessary fees before deadlines arise.

If you are in the minority of proactive students and feel victimized even still, then realize that it’s not the system’s fault.

For the most part we can attach blame to the ambition of everyone around us trying to get back to school this semester; whether it be due to economic fluctuations or the competitiveness of returning alumni.

When put into perspective, we must take responsibility for ourselves and realize that when the chips are stacked against us, we must attempt to stack them just as high or accept the loss knowing we didn’t do enough.