Ask Your Senators To Demand Tuition Reform

Ahmer Israr & David Warne The Santa ClaraApril 27, 2017After years of tuition and fee hikes, it is starting to become conventional wisdom that such increases are a fact of life for college students. We’re being asked to accept that higher costs and more debt are our inescapable future. We’re being told to accept a status quo that piles debt onto the backs of current Santa Clara students while simultaneously pricing out other potential Broncos entirely. To put things into perspective, consider this: spiraling healthcare costs have been such a concern that the entire system received a federal overhaul under the Obama Administration in 2010 and may receive another this year under the Trump Administration. But no such overhaul is the priority for education. According to Forbes, while healthcare costs were increasing at a rate of 3.7 percent annually, the cost of a college education rose by 5.2 percent per year. Everyone recognizes the looming, ballooning threat of the trillion dollar student loan bubble, which is threatening to upend the lives of college students and graduates nationwide. Despite this, nobody is acting to curb the costs that are fueling the bubble to begin with.When the financial well-being of students is so strongly threatened, we believe it is imperative upon the Associated Student Government to act. That is why we have authored and proposed the Education Affordability and Tuition Transparency Resolution. This one page document requests three simple things from Santa Clara’s administration:1) Limit tuition and fee increases for continuing students to the rate of inflation.2) Send out a two-page document showing exactly where our tuition dollars are being spent every year.3) Involve students in a dialogue surrounding any future changes to tuition and fees by working with ASG.We believe these three simple changes are urgently needed to make college more affordable and to give students a voice in how their money is spent. Some ASG Senators question whether or not this resolution is really needed and whether or not the administration will listen to our voice on such an important matter. While we realize that our goals are ambitious, we believe that ASG has a moral obligation to act. We have a responsibility to you, the students who elected us, to do our very best to fight for your interests. We have a duty to speak out and give you our all on this crucial issue. To those skeptical of our resolution’s chance of success, we would like to remind them that the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.That is why we have introduced this resolution and that is why we will fight for its passage this Thursday. We urge you to contact your student senators and encourage them to join us in voting YES to lower tuition prices and increase transparency.Ahmer Israr is a senior Public Health major and an At-Large Senator with the Associated Student Government of Santa Clara. David Warne is an English and economics double major and a First Year Senator. Articles in the Opinion section represent the views of the individual authors only and not the views of The Santa Clara or Santa Clara University.