The Chronicle of Higher Education recently released its annual report on the salaries paid to presidents of major American universities. ASU President Michael Crow landed at 14th on the salary list, pulling in more than $609,000.
Most of the time I like the direction our University is taking under Crow's leadership, so I appreciate the importance of paying him well. But something irks me about his pay raises: As the cost of attending ASU goes up, access to increased scholarship awards is going down.
Take, for example, the $1,000 in tuition increases during the four years that I have been a student here at ASU. And that doesn't even include added University fees.
Tuition increases aren't inherently bad; the progress of our University depends on resources, and students who benefit from those resources should pay for the progress.
The problem then, is that while tuition increases for current and incoming students, the scholarships that current students were originally awarded don't keep up.
The President's Scholarship, which included a tuition waiver plus $1,500 for freshmen entering in the fall of 2003, now is administered to freshmen as a lump sum of $7,000.
If you subtract the $4,591 tuition, you can see that the scholarship now includes the equivalent of an additional cash award for $2,409.
It won't matter as much for the Presidential Scholar of 2003-2004 because they were lucky enough to get a tuition waiver.
But now that the University has eliminated tuition waivers, what will happen for our freshmen four years down the road?
If they experience a similar $1,000 tuition hike during their time at ASU, they will have to pay that additional tuition cost, but their cash award won't increase.
And take a look at other merit-based scholarships. The ASU Alumni Medallion Award Scholarship doles out $2,000 for the 2006-2007 school year, but only $1,000 for freshmen who entered four years ago.
The University has also started developing ways to charge students who might already have a tuition waiver. Different colleges are charging fees every year, and President Crow has proposed an additional $100 technology fee.
These additional fees are usually applied and charged to existing students even if they entered the University three or four years ago with a tuition waiver.
Someone in the accounting office figured out that if you spell it f-e-e instead of t-u-i-t-i-o-n, students have to cough up the money.
There are two fair solutions to this problem. One would be switch to a fixed-tuition policy in which each student will only be charged for tuition and fees every year at the rate they were set at when that student entered the University.
The other would require the University to increase scholarships for current students when they increase them for new students.
I personally prefer the former. Tuition should be a contract between the University and the student.
If a student enters paying $3,500 they should only be charged that same amount every year until they graduate.
Students would be able to graduate on time without having to stop their education in order to figure out how to come up with the extra money to pay for new fees and tuition increases.
It also prevents a situation in which current students are charged additional fees to pay for progress that will not materialize until after those students graduate.
The administration is currently considering adding an option to pay more for tuition for such a contract.
When you make your holiday wish list this year, make sure you put fixed tuition at the top of the list. It's a gift that will be appreciated by generations of future ASU students.
Laura Thorson is a history and political science senior who wishes she, like President Crow, made $200,000 more than the president of the United States while overseeing 299,550,000 fewer people. Reach her at: Laura.Thorson@asu.edu.
