When it comes to student fees, ASUI President Max Cowan said students want to know where their money is going. Technically, that information can be accessed – but that doesn”t mean it”s accessible, Cowan said.
Cowan said he wants to make that information readily available to any student who wants to know.
“And when I say available, I mean the student can actually find it and actually understand it without getting a degree in finance,” Cowan said.
Cowan said understanding student fees is no small task. He learned about it by sitting on the Dedicated Student Fee Committee for three years.
“It truly is an incredibly complex beast,” he said.
Cowan said he thinks the best way for students to understand how their money is spent is to learn the same way he did – by doing it themselves.
Now, students can do that by accessing the “Where does your money go?” banner on the ASUI homepage. There, students will have the chance to peruse all the university departments that receive student fees.
Cowan said he hopes to have at least 60 responses by Feb. 1, when the Dedicated Student Fees Committee will convene to look at all the submissions. He said he hopes the exercise will help them better understand how students want their money to be spent so the committee can more accurately represent students” interests.
When Cowan addressed the ASUI Senate Wednesday evening, he said they had received 12 responses in the three days the site had been live.
Of those, Cowan said there were a few that dedicated a large portion of money to one or two departments, and others that dispersed funds more equally. So far, he said the responses indicate to him that those who have participated took the question seriously.
“We could have asked dumb questions,” Cowan said. “But I trust students are here to learn, and they want to be educated. We”re tired of people not trusting us to engage in topics that are complex and make decisions for ourselves.”
This semester, Cowan said he also plans to continue to move forward with his open textbook initiative, starting with the launch of a petition at uidaho.edu/open-textbooks.
“Many professors don”t know about these resources, and if they did they would be more inclined to adopt them,” Cowan said. “I think students don”t know they”re out there, as well.”
One program Cowan has explored for a possible open textbook policy is OpenStax, a platform used by several other major universities. With this program, professors can tailor textbooks to their class specifically by taking the available textbook and removing or rearranging chapters, or by substituting their own examples in the text.
Cowan said free textbooks also have the potential to save students hundreds of dollars.
Cowan said he hopes the petition will demonstrate to Faculty Senate and faculty leadership that open textbooks are an immediate concern to many students – he said he has data that shows each semester many students opt out of buying required textbooks altogether because they can”t afford it.
Cowan said many major universities across the U.S. are already adopting similar open textbook policies, though the practice is not yet widespread. That gives UI the opportunity to be a leader among its peers on that front, he said.
Up to this point, Cowan said the administration has been very supportive of the initiative. He said he is also seeking to formalize a partnership with OpenStax.
He said after that, his next goal is for three introductory-level classes to adopt open textbooks.
“If three courses like that make the switch, you have hundreds of students every year who would save hundreds of dollars, and when you add it all up that”s saving hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Cowan said. “You really start getting into the territory of making an impact in the affordability of college.”
Hannah Shirley can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @itshannah7