Students voiced their concerns about the proposed tuition surcharge at a town-hall meeting with President Michael Crow and the Undergraduate Student Government on Thursday afternoon in the Tempe campus Memorial Union.
Sarah Atwill, USG student affairs director and one of the event organizers, said the objective of the town hall was to educate students about both sides of the issues and give them an opportunity to share their opinions.
The Pima room in the MU was only half full at the beginning, but students trickled in, and by the end, students had to search for seats.
Lillian Ostrach, a first-year graduate student in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, said she came to the meeting to address her concerns as a graduate student.
Ostrach said she was personally concerned that teaching assistants and research assistants would be charged the $1,200 surcharge.
Although she is fortunate to have her tuition covered by the department she works in, she said she can’t afford a new fee.
“I think that there are other things the University could do than charge graduate students, especially, additional amounts of money, such as allowing us after our first year here to be reclassified as in-state residents,” Ostrach said.
When addressing Ostrach’s question in the Q&A session, Crow said research assistants and teaching assistants wouldn’t be affected by the surcharge.
Overall, Crow said, the University is trying to minimize the expense to students while keeping the quality of the school.
“We are going to do the best that we can on the resources that we can assemble, the lowest possible price that we can deliver to you the most excellent, highest quality educational experience that we possibly can,” Crow said.
Crow also said that with the current state funding, it will be difficult to maintain the excellence of ASU and its financial accessibility to all students without adding a surcharge.
“Of the 50 or 100 leading research universities in the country, we have fewer dollars per student to be able to do that than any of them,” he said.
Crow said state funding has been reduced to about $2,000 per student per year, from about $8,000 per student last year to the current to a projected $6,000 per student.
“That reduction is the largest public university reduction in the United States,” he said.
Jennifer Brandon, an art senior and a member of the USG Senate, said she is concerned about “revoking fees for specific colleges and rolling them into a surcharge.”
“The concern is, when it goes to a large pot, it doesn’t have any direct uses that we can see as students — we don’t see things change in our departments,” Brandon said.
Crow said the specific college fees were put into a single surcharge in order to lower the cost to students, simplify the process and to ensure that the surcharge would be limited.
Mark Appleton, president of USG, said many students are concerned with the issues of tuition already having been set, causing a surcharge to go against the current procedure of tuition setting for the Arizona Board of Regents.
“The whole point of having one tuition setting a year is to make sure that tuition is predictable,” Appleton said.
Other issues include making tuition unaffordable and charging a surcharge fee before the amount of stimulus money is certain, he said.
“$1,200 dollars is a lot of money. You’re looking at, with the academic recovery surcharge plus the tuition increase in the fall, an increase of about 31 percent to your tuition [for in-state undergraduates],” Appleton said.
Reach the reporter at reweaver@asu.edu.
