COLUMN: Student fees just creative thievery
This past summer I decided to take a one-credit internship course. I thought it would help me graduate sooner. Turns out, I was wrong.
The cost of my mistake in both tuition and fees: $489.81.
With that money, I could have bought a round-trip ticket to Cancun, a new camera, or a good 500 Hot Pockets.
Of course, I can’t complain too much. After all, it was my mistake.
But the part that frustrates me the most isn’t the tuition dollars I was charged, but rather the fees. Of that nearly $500 I paid for that one credit, approximately $200 of it went to student body fees.
Ouch.
Summer students especially have cause for complaint. Full-time students will pay a $27 activity fee and $53 athletic fee. Never mind the fact that the university holds no activities or athletic events during the summer months. All the same, you’re still stuck paying $80 of useless fees. Multiply that number by the more than 4,000 students who attend summer school and voilá, you get more than $300,000. Not a bad profit margin given the $0 in expenses we incur.
To correct the problem, students attending summer school should not pay for any activity or athletic fees. Yes, the school may lose out on needed money from those fees, but it may also encourage other students to enroll in the cheaper summer courses.
USU already offers in-state tuition to any student wishing to take summer courses. Well, the lower fees might encourage more Utah students to attend as well.
And that’s just the start of the fee fiasco here on campus. Don’t be surprised to see various departmental fees sneek into your overall tuition costs. For example, I am a student in the journalism department, which charges students an additional $35 for almost every class offered. One day, I got up the courage to ask the department head why we pay the extra fee. He responded that they use it to pay for the 25 computers our department runs.
Sounds simple enough. Of course, very few classes are held in the lab. My two classes this semester both require a computer lab fee even though we don’t need the computers for our coursework. Beyond class time, very few students in my department ever use that computer lab. Is that $35 fee just a bit excessive?
In my two years at USU, I have spent $200 in fees just for those computers. It’s not that big of a deal, but remember, we all pay $57 a semester in campus computer lab fees on top of that. In four years, every USU student will pay more than $450 for campus computers. Journalism students will pay around $650. For that much, I can almost buy my own laptop. Not to mention the Hot Pockets I could afford.
Coincidentally enough, individual departments receive every dime of these specific course fees. On the other hand, basic university fees and tuition dollars are disbursed as the university administration sees fit. With the university slashing various department budgets time and time again, it’s not surprising to see so many course fees across the university. It’s a way to help assure a stable budget.
But what kind of oversight do we have on such fees? Very few students know where their fee dollars actually go. Yet all of us are forced to pay them.
In paying departmental fees, students should be told, either in a syllabus or on their Banner account, specifically why they are being assessed the extra fee. If I want to complain, I can go directly to the instructor or department head.
And if you don’t care about it from there, well, you deserve to lose the money.
Jon Cox is a senior majoring in journalism. Comments can be sent to jcox@cc.usu.edu.