After reading Katherine Kehoe’s Sept. 26 article “Student Senate votes on proposed fee increases,” I can certainly understand why fees are increasing.
To understand why fees increase, we should understand the mechanism that controls the fees. No fewer than three committees, an entire branch of student government, the board of trustees, the board of governors (what exactly is the difference between trustees and governors?) and the entire North Carolina Legislature are involved. Gideon Tucker’s famous quote, “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session,” seems fitting here.
I contacted Student Body President Alex Parker about this last week. Sadly, Alex told me that I was the only student who responded to his call for feedback in the middle of September.
Whoever came up with this convoluted process understood clearly that just about anything could be passed through this labyrinthine of bureaucracy. I suspect that there are only a handful of students on campus that could speak cogently about this and even fewer that are actively involved. A lack of meaningful student participation in the process should be alarming to every student at N.C. State. Did you know that fees are poised to increase by more than $83 per semester? That’s more than an extra 7 percent on top of the $1,084 that full-time students already pay in fees each semester.
How many students are asking questions about where their $2,168 is going every year?
There are no fewer than 10 special interest groups, in addition to Student Government, that are vying for more money. These include the Office for Institutional Equity and Diversity (whose cryptic mission statement includes such vagaries as “fostering an inclusive, accessible, and diverse intellectual and cultural campus experience,” which I would have thought was achieved by the diverse community of students we have, and not by a group of bureaucrats), Arts N.C. State, a group that has its own vice-provost at the costly sum of $131,524 per year, and the Union Activities Board (a group that I’d never heard of until reading this article, despite having been a part-time student since 2008).
How many of these groups have you heard of? You’re paying for them, after all!
UNC-System President Tom Ross wryly notes that tuition won’t be rising, but fees will. Call it tuition, fees or whatever else, but the result is the same: The cost of our education is increasing. And I doubt that the fees are increasing because of inflationary cost increases. I suspect it’s because we need another committee, another board, another provost or another special interest group that wants to fund itself on the back of every student.
And to be clear, my educational experiences at N.C. State have been top-notch. I’ve attended no fewer than five colleges and universities in the past 20 years, and I’ve never met a group of educators as dedicated to providing a high-quality educational experience as I have at N.C. State.
I simultaneously find it mind boggling how institutional and bureaucratic the University is. Every time I pay tuition, I’m reminded that about a quarter of this money goes to “fees;” fees for sporting events that I have no intention of patronizing, fees for legal services that I’ll likely never use, fees for a public transit system that is of no service to this adult student who lives in north Raleigh, fees for renovating student center buildings that I’ve yet to set a foot in (and may not be complete before I graduate), fees for a health services complex that does little more than harass me about my immunization records, fees for the new student orientation (that I diligently attended, and which I can safely say was a wasted day), and fees for a myriad of other things that have questionable value.
And if the fees aren’t bad enough, the institutional ineptitude could keep comedians in full-time work. Like the time I tried to pay tuition in person and was told that the cashier’s office would no longer accept in-person payments, which begs the question: Why do we have a brick-and-mortar cashier’s office in the first place? Or like the time I pre-ordered books at the bookstore (under the egis of saving time), which turned into a half-hour long exercise in stair-climbing as I went back and forth between the bookstore cashier and the third-floor office where I was to pick up my books.
I don’t know what’s more disheartening; that our bloated institution recklessly funds itself with our hard-earned money or that so few students seem to care.
Fee increases? How about convincing me that I’m getting good value for the money I’m already spending? How about demonstrating the sort of fiscal responsibility that private, for-profit enterprises have to demonstrate to remain competitive? And how about remembering that, at the end of the day, the University exists to service the people of North Carolina and not the other way around?
The committee wants feedback about the fees. From this student’s perspective, they’re wasted money — money that I’m forced to pay, even though I’m not receiving any value in return. Instead of raising the fees and robbing us of even more money, how about spending some time convincing us that the money we’re already giving to the school is being well spent?
Note: The Student Fee Committe recommended a $3.10 fee increase for Student Media. The Technician is a part of SMA, and the increase will fund a full-time production assistant for the Technician and the Nubian Message.