Freeze tuition not students education

By Gus Bode

Let’s see if we can make sense of the mess that is supposed to benefit students.

Sorry, we meant supposed to benefit the next two classes of freshmen to enter SIUC.

Make no mistake about it, the tuition freeze passed in the House and will guarantee a steady tuition rate for four consecutive years. This is great, but what about the other three classes of students who have been struggling to pay for school? What type of tuition increase do they face?

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Apparently, students will receive a bill that is16 percent higher than last year on their bursar bill. And those not entering as freshmen in the fall may also be victims to an increase of seven and eight percent increases respectively. For those students, a tuition freeze is a little too late.

There is no denying a freeze is a great idea, but there are a number of questions that need to be addressed.

It is unclear whether or not transfer students will benefit from the freeze or even how long incoming freshmen will benefit.

It appears that University administrators don’t even fully understand what is going on. In one breath, it is said this will be a great deal for students and parents because it will help them save for college. Then it is said the University cannot guarantee stagnant rates, but it will be able to give them an idea of what their first two years will cost and then a projection of what their final two years might look like.

Which one is it? Either offer a freeze for the entire four years for all new SIUC students, or don’t offer one at all.

When it comes to money, students don’t want to be played with. No one wants to play games with their education.

While SIUC boasts the fact that it is the fifth most affordable university in Illinois, at the rate it is going with uncertainty of tuition cost, no one will care where it stands on the list.

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The students who are not a part of the freeze will have the shortest end of the stick. The sophomore class will have another two years to feel the effects of a tuition increase, and probably the worst.

Think about it. If the University needed to raise tuition, but could not raise it for the class that entered for the 2003-2004 school year, the raise could be tacked on to the cost for other classes, making their education less affordable.

We don’t want to see that happen.

There are always pros and cons to any situation; and, in this case, the idea of a tuition freeze should not have been released to the public until the list of cons was an empty column.

Freezing tuition for four years should be enacted, but it should not benefit a freshmen class at the expense of the other three classes of students at SIUC.

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