A lot of students are angry about the fact that ASU no longer offers full tuition scholarships. And, quite frankly, I don't blame them.
Many students, especially those National Merit Scholars that President Crow and Honors College Dean Mark Jacobs covet, will continue to receive scholarships that will fully cover the costs of their tuition.
The difference is that ASU no longer offers full tuition scholarships in the form of tuition waivers. Instead, all scholarships at ASU now come in the form of specific dollar amounts, meaning that no ASU students will be unaffected by tuition increases.
The types of students who got tuition waivers, as you might guess, do their homework, study for class and are otherwise active in campus organizations and student government.
In other words, there is a sort of political elite on campus. If you've ever been to a party with the Undergraduate Student Government crowd or attended a USG Senate meeting, you have had the unfortunate experience of finding this out. You also know that USG couldn't throw a party to save their lives.
But the point is that these students, often with scholarship, are very active in campus affairs. They fight the internal fights of how ASU bureaucracy will function, and sadly, they do often affect policy, even if it is in very moderate ways.
This is why the change from offering full tuition waivers to specific dollar-amount scholarships is so fascinating, and why also it may have some serious ramifications for the politics surrounding future tuition increases at ASU.
Those who most regularly involve themselves in campus politics are now affected by changes in tuitions rates because of this new policy. Before it, students with full tuition waivers had no incentive to concern themselves with the skyrocketing rates of tuition, as such affairs did not concern them.
I don't mean to say that this new scholarship policy is necessarily good or bad. To be exact, I think is it both good and bad: it is good for those without tuitions waivers, and bad for those who have them.
Those of you who would've gotten tuition waivers, and instead received specific dollar amounts amid a storm of rising tuition costs, I send my condolences. For those of you who do not have full scholarships, myself included, we now have powerful student-allies in the fight against rising tuition.
Those who campaign most vehemently for issues of significance on campus, generally speaking, now have the same incentive as the rest of us to oppose tuition increases. And this very well means that opposition to proposed tuition and fee increases in the coming years is likely to grow.
Think back to last year's "Students Can't Survive 8.5" campaign, and the minor success that it had. The campaign did result in ABOR adopting a smaller tuition increase than the University proposed.
Now think of such a campaign with the force of fully-incentives student advocates, who now will be just as affected by tuition increases as any other student.
This change is significant to ASU as an institution. Those who would have full tuition waivers no longer have security from the tide of rising tuition. Those who do not now have additional advocates who will bear the same costs of tuition increases as the rest of us.
Macy Hanson is a philosophy and political science senior. Contact him at: macy.hanson@asuchoice.com.
