This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Monday, September 03, 2007

The Fee Scam

Tomorrow's New York Times has an article about the many universities and colleges that hit their students up for higher and higher fees every year. Fees are add-on expenses beyond tuition, and they cover, as the NYT notes, everything conceivable: energy, technology, health, buildings and grounds, student activities, libraries, course materials, transportation... but the biggie at most places is athletics.

For instance, "The University of North Dakota has imposed a $37 per semester fee to pay for pulling its whole athletic program into Division I." We already know about Southern Illinois and its huge Saluki Way fees. Other sports-mad schools, like San Diego State and Indiana University (where the sports fee went up so amazingly one year that student protests forced the university to rescind it), are notorious for rip-off fees.



From tomorrow's article:

'Some students are rebelling, calling fees an underhanded tuition increase that obscures the real cost of college. In Arizona, students recently called on the Regents to change the fee-setting process. “A lot of students felt like fees were being used for services that used to be covered by tuition,” said Serena Unrein, executive director of the Arizona Students’ Association.

In Oregon, students went to the Legislature last spring to demand relief. “Students want more transparency,” said Ms. McLain, who is student body president.

And in California last year a state judge ordered the University of California system to pay back millions of dollars to the students who sued the university system in 2003 charging that increases in fees violated university assurances that fees would stay fixed for current students. The University of California has appealed the decision.'


Over the years UD's featured a number of articles from student newspapers chronicling discontent with fees... um, have to tack on more words here in order to have something to highlight for the links...