As the academic year ends, many students are excited for summer and the optimism a new school year brings. Unfortunately, for other students on campus a new semester brings a new weight of growing financial burdens.
Some students at the University of Idaho feel upset and worried about tuition increasing. Next academic year tuition will increase 3% from last semester due to inflation and colleges submitting their funding requests for the CEC (Change in Employee Compensation). This is having many students contemplate how rising tuition is going to affect them.
Dillan Clark, an undergraduate heading into his final year as a medical science major, says it’s frustrating to hear about tuition increasing each year. Clark says he didn’t have to take loans out to help pay for college until this semester.
“This was my first semester I had to take out student loans, and I will have to next semester too,” Clark said.
Clark recalls a big reason he chose to come to UI was because of the university’s reputation around its “great value” in comparison to other colleges. He questions if UI will be able to hold the title of “Best Value Public University in the West” if they keep raising tuition. When Clark started at UI tuition was $8,340, next academic year he’ll pay $9,084.
“If you increase tuition by 3% every year, it adds up. And I think that’s the main reason why college tuition has become so expensive and unaffordable,” Pat McMahon, an international studies major from California said.
McMahon, a junior, is part of the Western Undergrad Exchange program, to save on out-of-state tuition. She reflects on how much she pays for tuition now compared to her freshman year,
“Tuition increasing greatly affects me, like the amount of loans I take out and then it also affects how much interest I have to pay,” McMahon said.
McMahon says she wishes the university could be more supported through state funding or that there were other solutions to financially support the university without raising students’ tuition and suggests money from tuition increases isn’t being allocated correctly.
“I think students would be happier if tuition got raised and the majority of them benefited from it. Like if we were to improve parking or dorm life,” McMahon said.
She also opened up about having a lot of friends who have dropped out or changed their academic plans because of financial reasons over the past 2 years. She said she feels sympathy for students who can’t rely on financial support from their parents, which she says might diminish the amount of first-generation college students going to college.
Clark and McMahon both express their frustrations with lack of communication from the university about when they choose to raise tuition and why. Clark says he only knows how much he’s going to pay when he opens his billing statement to pay his tuition. As for McMahon, she wishes the university was more transparent about where her money is going,
“See every time they raise tuition, I have no idea why it’s changing, so I think they should probably be more honest about where your tuition is going at the least,” McMahon said.
Alyssa Johnson can be reached at [email protected]