Letter to the editor: Board excludes 80%+ of USU students from affordability considerations
Three years ago, while we all hunkered down in our living quarters during the pandemic, the Utah State Board of Regents approved tuition increases for public colleges and universities. Before the tuition increases rolled out, then-Gov. Gary Herbert requested that the regents develop a definition of affordability. Here is their well-crafted definition:
“Affordability is the ability of a traditional full-time Utah student from a family of four to cover the cost of attendance at a USHE institution while living at home with financial aid, reasonable family savings and the student contributing 10 hours of weekly work earnings and without incurring student debt.”
We Aggies boast that about 80% of our student body lives away from home. Of those (traditional) students that live at home, I wonder how many hail from a family of precisely four, work 10 hours a week, and incur no student debt. Moreover, the board requires that the students’ family is not rich enough to disqualify the student from receiving financial aid, and yet rich enough to supply the student with thousands.
It’s not that the board doesn’t want college to be affordable: they do. It’s that college should only be affordable for less than 20% of us. It’s like fitting a curve to data in statistics, where you throw out the outliers before fitting the curve: just count 80% of your points as outliers.
To be fair, the cost of college in Utah is cheaper than in many other states. On the other hand, I have seen the rate for tuition/fees, since becoming a student here at USU, increase by about 48%. Even if the return on investment has increased as well, we students still need to be able to pay for college in the first place.
The reasons for tuition/fee increases are many and varied, and indeed difficult to address. However, there are a few simple steps that can be taken to help. I would like to point out two of these steps.
Sometime in the 2010 decade—perhaps around 2012—USU adopted a model for tuition pricing: the plateau. Students taking 12-18 credits now pay the same for tuition and fees. This is great for full-time undergraduate students, but it necessarily makes the tuition rates less favorable for students taking fewer than 12 credits. These students include those taking time for work, as well as many graduate students, considered full-time students with 6-9 credits. USU should institute a simple linear model for tuition and fee pricing.
Secondly, there are about 20,000 undergraduate and graduate students here in Logan, and yet the total capacity for the Spectrum is about 10,000. Most of us are too busy doing homework to even think about attending sports events: USU should lower fees so that we stop paying for tickets to get into games we don’t have time to go to.
By instituting simple measures, USU can help take the edge off of rising tuition costs. Advocate for change!
Ben Shaw is a graduate student in the department of mathematics and statistics. Originally from the Salt Lake Valley, he began his undergraduate journey in 2011. He enjoys outdoor recreation with his wife and three children.
— ben.shaw@usu.edu