At the beginning of the decade, the cost of in-state attendance at the University was less than $3,000 per year. In the fall, most students will be paying an annual bill exceeding $7,000.
Under the proposed “economic recovery surcharge,” all students would temporarily see a $1,200-a-year fee added to their tuition costs until the school recovers from budget cuts. This move, still pending the approval of the Arizona Board of Regents, would hit the students at the same time tuition is set to increase an already approved 5 percent.
With the surcharge factored in, the numbers are not pretty for incoming in-state freshmen. They will be facing $7,450 in tuition and fees.
It’s not much prettier for returning in-state students who will face between $6,769 and $7,132.
And let’s not forget that additional $100-plus school-specific fees are still on the table for more expensive majors such as nursing, engineering, business and design.
Obviously, this is bad news no matter how you cut it. It’s not exactly a well-guarded secret that the economy is in the toilet and that college students were not regarded as a wealthy demographic before the proverbial economic excrement hit the fan. And, we figure, even those students who aren’t struggling mightily under the crush of the financial meltdown are unlikely to have a spare $600 per semester sitting around for school fees.
On the other side of the issue, the state universities’ financial woes have likewise not been flying under the radar. ASU alone has lost about $88 million in state funding in the past year. We get the reasoning behind the surcharges; it was an unenviable choice to either blow up the services the University is able to provide or to stick students with a steeper price tag. As has been the case in this fiscal year, the administration had its hands tied.
Yet even though the cuts had to be made up somewhere, we worry that these surcharges will be too much for students to handle. For many, these jumps severely jeopardize the ability to attend the University. A majority of college students — or at least the fiscally conscious ones — plan out their financial paths to a diploma. They use scholarships, grants and loans — all of which are not given out with the contingency of raised tuition and fees in mind — to cover tuition costs. Of course, this doesn’t even include the hundreds of dollars that must be applied to books, supplies, transportation, etc.
So, what does a student do when a supposedly full-ride scholarship doesn’t end up covering the costs of school?
Unfortunately, it seems like we’re about to find out.
So what does the student body do about it? We hold the administration accountable for all expenditures, following the dollar with diligence. We cross our fingers that the budget crisis eases up in the future fiscal years and allows this surcharge to maintain its temporary nature.
And we stay hopeful — that our state wises up to the importance of higher education, that our fellow students and ourselves won’t be forced to drop out, and that this surcharge won’t end up digging Arizona’s future an even deeper ditch.
