About a hundred students at San Diego State University marched Thursday afternoon and crowded the school president’s office to protest a hike in school fees.
May 1st – International Workers’ Day – is a traditional day of protest for fair labor and wage practices both on and off college campuses. In recent years, it has also become a way for students to express opposition to school policies in the name of fair business and labor practices.
This year, the biggest issue at San Diego State University may be that of the so-called “student success fee,” an extra line item that will show up when students pay their bills, in addition to tuition and books. The fee will begin at $50 a semester starting in the fall, but it will be raised incrementally until it reaches $200 a semester in 2017. That would bring the cost of mandatory attendance fees, in addition to tuition and books, to $1,694 a year.
The fees are expected to generate more than $12 million a year. School officials say the new fee is absolutely necessary for bringing in more tenure-track professors. Students say that it places an unfair burden squarely on their shoulders and their already debt-strapped wallets.
The move has become a source of tension between administrators and students. Senior Christopher Lara-Cruz says he sees it as a piece of the bigger picture: an ongoing ideological battle over who should pay for public education.
“The master plan for education was that it would be more on the state,” said Lara-Cruz. “And the state as a whole, and the electorate, chose to go along with that. They wanted the state to reinvest, which is why they passed Prop 30.”
Proposition 30, passed in 2012, authorized California to increase taxes to prevent further education budget cuts.
SDSU President Elliot Hirshman says that’s just not realistic any more – and in fact, it never truly was.
“The hope under the Master Plan was that state support would be sufficient to cover all the educational expenses,” he said. “That turned out from the start not to be true, in that certain things like laboratory materials were never covered by the Master Plan. But as time has gone on, and the support from the state has been reduced. Then there has been need for other sources to support the educational program, and tuition has been one of them.”
Hirshman said that California’s freeze on tuition fee increases in 2012 made it necessary to create the additional fees, which he emphasized will go mainly to creating new jobs for educators. Plus, he said, the school is in a no-win situation, thanks to state policy and students’ expectations.
“You have a tension between the cultural traditions of the Master Plan, where the assumption would be that the state would cover the costs and students would not, and the reality of supporting strong academic programs, which is that if the state doesn’t provide those costs then students through tuition and fees have to be a part of that solution,” he said.
“And so that’s where we are in California, often with a tension between the historical context of the Master Plan and the realities of today. “
Peter Herman who is a professor at San Diego State University, said that while he understands the difficulty of paying an extra fee every semester, he feels it is a necessary evil for the foreseeable future.
“What this fee is going to do is make a small but absolutely necessary dent in replenishing our faculty. It’s not a lot of money, and there are also protections built in to make sure that nobody has to leave San Diego State because of financial reasons,” Herman said.
“In other words, some of the money is going to be going towards a fund that will help students.”
Furthermore, said school spokesman Greg Block, the school sent out emails and put out sandwich boards to inform the students that a vote on the fees was set to take place.
The school used what they called an “alternative consultation process,” which invited students to provide feedback to the Campus Fee Advisory Council, and then took a representative vote.
“There was a very clean process, a very transparent process, there was plenty of opportunity for people to participate. The reasons why people didn’t participate I can’t speak to, but there was a very good, clean process for participation, and again – 64 percent of the people, who did participate, heard the presentations, and had the opportunity to voice their opinion and they voted in favor of the fee.”
But opponents of the fee, like graduate student Andrew Tangeman, said that despite the school’s claims to the contrary, the student body had no say in the matter. Even if they send out an email, he said, many students probably never saw it.
“To me the amount of clutter we receive in emails on a daily basis, especially with keeping up with classes… it’s a little bit difficult for everyone to obtain information by that way.
“And that’s one of the reasons why when we vote and we rate professors, we’re required to do that before we register for classes. So, to me, the question was, why wasn’t there a referendum required prior to registering for classes? That would have ensured a hundred-percent turnout rate, and more accurately represent the student opinion.”
San Diego State student Christopher Lara-Cruz said they have alternative ideas for raising the money that would otherwise come down on the students.
“A lot of us student leaders are also taking a proactive approach in advocating for Prop 13 reform as well as an oil extraction fee to get more money for education. So instead of saying oh, this is the reality, this is the polls, there’s nothing we can do… we’re taking the approach of, that may be the reality but reality can be changed.”
Student success fee hikes have been rolled out across the California State University system to similar protests. San Jose State University recently agreed to lower its success fee after it came under fire for using a large part of the money generated for athletics programs.
