Students to rally at Capital
The Associated Students of Utah State University will be involved in this year’s rally on Capitol Hill Wednesday in Salt Lake City.
The rally, which was organized by the Utah Student Association (USA), will be addressing issues surrounding higher education tuition rates and financial aid.
“We are in a really, really interesting year where we have a legislative budget that would not allocate the dollars we received last year,” Steve Palmer, president of ASUSU, said. “This year, with the economic downfall, there won’t be the money needed to appropriate higher education,” he said.
One of the major fears of USA is that this year the legislature will be looking at some of the other institutions within the state, Palmer said. By doing this, he said, the legislature will recognize that public schools cannot increase their tuition while higher education can.
“So, our worry is that they’ll cut the budget and not allow the same type of money to come in to higher education as they have done in the past, and they will force institutions to raise tuitions,” Palmer said. “Our first objectives this year is to keep tuition relatively low.”
According to USA’s official proposal and presentation to the Board of Regents and the Utah State Legislature, USA “requests that funds that were held back from Fiscal Year 2002 appropriated budget be restored to Higher Education.”
Other proposals stated in the presentation include the increase of faculty salaries and the increase funding of libraries. USA also proposed that the Board of Regents conduct practical research to find out if “a student statewide health insurance plan would be cost beneficial for students.”
Speaking of tuition increase, Palmer said while students should pay a fair amount for their education, a high increase in tuition is just not feasible.
“I think there needs to be some sort of a modest increase, but I think the legislature also needs to pull their fair share,” he said.
This ties in with the issue of financial aid USA will be addressing during the rally. According to USA’s presentation, should tuition increase, a balanced amount of financial aid must also be established.
Palmer said one of the policies set up by the regents is that tuition and financial aid must exist proportionally, but unfortunately this never happens.
“I’m not talking about loans, I am talking about whole harmless grants,” Palmer said. “For it [financial aid] to stay constant with last year, it needs to raise by a million dollars this year.
“Theoretically, anytime tuition goes up, you’re going to lose percentage at the bottom and be unable to cover the cost,” he said. “But if [you] supplement that with financial aid, you should not be losing that many students.”
If this goes into practice, more students will be able to qualify for funding and will continue attending school, Palmer said.
“We’ve played around with the idea to support anything that will decrease the time to graduation because that will save [the] state money as well,” he said.
Palmer said students in Utah take an average of 150 credits before graduation while the median is 120. One of the many ways to increase money in the system is to decrease access waste, he said.
“If we can keep tuition to a modest level this year and we can get financial aid to couple with the tuition increase, we will have a major victory for students,” Palmer said.
Lauren Hurst, a junior majoring in biology, said she is glad to know ASUSU is actually doing something which can benefit the entire student body.
“The more voices that they have there, the more impact they will have,” Hurst said.
Palmer said, “When I represent students at this capacity, I need to be careful I am not just representing USU. I have to keep in mind that I am representing 110,000 students, not just the 17,000 back in Logan.”
USA represents all higher education institutions in the state of Utah. The Higher Education rally will be held at noon on Wednesday at Capitol Hill. Celestial Starr Bybee, executive vice president of ASUSU, encourages students to participate in the rally.
“We’d like to pack the bus,” she said.
Free transportation will be provided for students who would like to join the rally. The arranged transportation will leave Circle Drive at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday. Reservations must be made through Bybee, and she can be contacted at 797-1727. Students who plan to participate in the rally will have permission to be excused from their classes.
Regarding the rally, Palmer said, “It’s not a bill but more of an effort of lobbying by contacting key legislators in asking them to basically hold higher education harmless from some of the economic shortfall.
“The more money we can get from the legislature, the better chance we have on keeping tuition low,” he said.