The cost of attending Utah State University next year will increase, The Herald Journal reports, but the question is where those increases will go.
You know already about the student fee increase referendum (the results of which we’ll announce on the radio tonight sometime in the 5 p.m. hour). If the student fee referendum is approved, President Stan Albrecht announced at a meeting Monday, tuition hikes will likely be in the 4 to 4.5 percent range.
If the fee is defeated, the hike will be higher, though not higher than 8 percent.
And I, for one, am OK with that. Yes, even given my personal opposition to the athletics fee increase.
The thing is, my opposition to the student fee increase for athletics is stemmed in the inappropriateness of giving more than $2 million to athletics at a time when people on the academic side of losing jobs and programs are being cut. If tuition hikes can be used to prevent some of the academic losses, then it’s a worthwhile cost.
It all depends on the results of the vote tonight, however. We’ll discuss this issue at 5:10 on KVNU’s For the People.
So they’ll raise tuition a little if the fee passes, and a lot if it fails. Doesn’t that basically mean that students will be paying the money to athletics one way or another? Or are they claiming that they will be merciful to the students if they vote for the fee by raising tuition less?
Craig, not that it’s relevant now, but the greater tuition increase would’ve gone to academic purposes. Tuition can’t be used for athletics. The students voted today to divert new monies from academics to athletics, however, so I hope that the softball team finishing sixth instead of seventh helps build the prestige of their degrees to compensate for the hit their degrees will take when we lose several programs and premium faculty.