New tuition, same education
By Koren Temple
It happened again, folks. We opened our mailboxes to be greeted with a manila envelope filled with Santa Clara facts, awards, and our high ranking in the U.S. News and World Report.
Oh, the prestige.
Boastful fact after boastful fact, the administration finally drops the bomb on us: tuition increases. That's right: a whopping $1,770 increase.
Isn't it enough that students pay the already ridiculous $25, 365? I guess not, because year after year, Santa Clara increases its tuition to cover the university's growing expenses.
Last year, the tuition increased by six percent. The year before that, again by six percent. And before that, ten percent. Tuition increases have been a steady plague at Santa Clara, so much so, that the tuition in 1990 was about a third of what we will pay next fall. At this rate, Santa Clara students will be paying over $51, 000 for tuition in ten years.
So why all these increases?
Budget Director Dennis Roberts told The Santa Clara last week that faculty and staff compensation is set to increase as a result of the rising costs of living, and by a 22 percent increase in the cost of health plan benefits. The increases come because staff and faculty compensation accounts for 50 percent of the budget.
But in the Faculty-Staff newsletter published March 1, the average increases for faculty and staff is only three percent.
And health premiums? Those aren't even going to change, according to the newsletter.
The new budget also provides for improvements in operating funds, library resources, technology, capital projects and improvements in instructional quality.
From last year to this year, I didn't see any need to improve our operating funds. The university seemed to operate fine without the six percent increase.
Sophomore Jennifer Stoddard agrees.
"The steady increase is stupid. I mean I'm not going to be treated any differently next year because I'm paying more," said the psychology major who plans to move off campus because of the increasing tuition.
And improvements in educational quality? The professors teach the same way they did last year. Plus, I think the professors can handle the increased costs of living in the Bay Area, since they make about an average of $107,000 a year, which is more than the average professor gets paid at Amherst, Brown and Vanderbilt universities. And at San Jose State, professors get an average of $25,000 less than the professors at Santa Clara. Yet they manage to survive the rising costs.
Santa Clara has no problem fund-raising, since year after year they continuously generate more money. Last year the endowment reached over $401.4 million. Not to include their total assets which is reaching the ten-digit jump.
All that, and they still want to make the undergraduates pay around $123.5 million.
What happen to the "three C's" the university likes to adamantly flaunt in their mission statement? Compassion, Competence, and Conscience?
Why isn't Santa Clara compassionate enough to give students a break from increases? Why aren't they competent enough to operate a steady budget? And why aren't they conscience enough to see that students are not happy.
"It's nice to have a pretty place to be at," said Stoddard, who depends on scholarships to cover tuition expenses. "But if they are going to spend our excess tuition money on more palm trees and expensive shrubbery, like whatever."
Stoddard, like the rest of the student body, is frustrated because it is not fair to continuously impose these ridiculous hikes in tuition on us. With the failing economy, lack of new jobs, and the average Santa Clara starting salary in 2003 being only $44,000, the increases need to stop.
The question is when? Does it take a march on Benson's steps, or a declining enrollment to stop them? Because really, it's all about supply and demand: Santa Clara is demanding way too much from its students, and not supplying enough.
And those facts thrown around in the manila letters don't cut it.
û Contact Koren Temple at (408) 554-4852 or ktemple@scu.edu.