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The Hechinger Report
Already stretched grad students rebel against rising and often surreptitious fees
Universities seeking revenue levy “academic excellence” and other non-tuition charges
By Jon Marcud
August 2, 2019
NEW YORK — The quiet of the summer seemed a good time for at least one
new enrollee to come fill out his paperwork for the master’s program in
public administration at Baruch College, part of the City University of
New York.
Except for the backpack he was wearing, it would have been hard to pick
him out as a graduate student. Like many Americans who go to graduate
school, he already works full time outside of school and will attend
Baruch part time for the next three years in the hope of improving his
career prospects. He’ll pay for it himself with student loans.
That’s why he was so perturbed to learn that, on top of the tuition for
which he’s already budgeted, he’ll have to pay the university a
$1,000-a-year “academic excellence fee.” He’s lucky it’s only that
much. In one department at Baruch, this fee is $2,000 a year; in
another, $8,000.
He didn’t plan for that additional cost, said the student, who asked
that his name not be used for fear of retribution from administrators
for discussing it.
“This is not cheap,” he said, exasperated, outside the university’s Information and Technology Building.
“It’s like when you’re an undergraduate,” he said, rattling off
all the fees he paid then. “Technology fee. Transportation fee. Student
activity fee. There’s like five other fees that all have weird names.
You’re already paying for these services. It’s just another way of
charging extra.”
If undergraduates are tired of these fees, graduate students are
incensed — and starting to push back. This is especially true among the
many who were promised free tuition and small stipends to work as
teaching or research assistants, but who have been surprised to find
they still have to pay thousands of dollars in fees with euphemistic
names and indeterminate purposes. Some of these students, who help
teach undergrads and supply important labor in campus labs, are having
to take out loans just to pay the fees.
And while there remains reluctance among graduate students like the one
at Baruch to jeopardize their standing by speaking out about this,
others are beginning to transform their anger into strikes and
protests. A handful of faculty are taking up their cause. And a few
institutions have bowed to demands that they reduce or eliminate some
graduate student fees, though often with limits and conditions.
The total amount of fees charged by universities and colleges more than
doubled in the 15 years ending in 2017, the last period for which the
figure is available, even when adjusted for inflation. That’s up faster
than tuition, which rose 80 percent during the same period, according
to one of the very few analyses of this little-reported part of college
costs, by Seton Hall University education professor Robert Kelchen.
Fees alone now account for more than a fifth of what students have to
pay for college, before room and board is added.
There’s no comprehensive independent breakdown of graduate student fees
alone, but many institutions have increased those, too. One study of
fees paid by graduate students at top research institutions found that
they’re $4,653 per year at Louisiana State University, $3,622 at North
Carolina State and $3,160 at the University of Tennessee.
Graduate students are already seeing their net costs increase faster
than undergraduates’. One result of this is that the share of federal
loans going to graduate students rose from 32 percent in 2002 to 40
percent last year, while undergraduate borrowing — which gets most of
the attention — has actually been falling since 2012, according to the
College Board.
Graduate students each now owe three times more, on average, than the average undergraduate, according to the Urban Institute.
“And I’m about to be in that pile,” said the student at Baruch.
Baruch wouldn’t initially say, despite being asked repeatedly over five
weeks, what its “academic excellence fee” is for; spokeswoman Suzanne
Bronski provided only a written statement saying that all fees are
disclosed on the website and that an “overwhelming majority” of similar
institutions also charge them. As this story was about to run, Bronski
said the fee paid for graduate faculty, advisors and career services.
Figures provided in response to a public-records request show that
Baruch collected $8.8 million from graduate student fees in the
academic year just ended, on top of the $29.8 million in graduate
tuition it charged.
Many fees like this were added at the beginning of the last recession
by public universities when state funding was cut. But instead of being
phased out as the economy recovered, they’ve steadily increased.
The University of Georgia System Board of Regents, for example, imposed
a “special institutional fee” of $100 per semester as a
“temporary measure” to make up for state cutbacks in 2009. It’s still
there, and now up to $344 per semester for graduate students, part of a
slate of fees that add up to $1,012 per semester.
“It may not seem like a lot, but when you’re making [a stipend of]
$25,000 and working in a major city, it’s a major problem,” said Joshua
Weitz, a professor of biological sciences at the Georgia Institute of
Technology. Weitz depends on graduate students as teaching and research
assistants and has become an outspoken critic of these fees.
“We would expect that we wouldn’t be making them pay a fee to do the work we want them to do,” he said.
Terri Dunbar, a doctoral student in psychology at Georgia Tech who also
works as a teaching fellow, estimates her fees at about $4,000 a year,
including for the summer, when she stays on campus. Unable to cover
those from her $20,000-a-year stipend while also living in Atlanta,
Dunbar said, she’s borrowed around $20,000 just to pay for fees.
Universities’ mindset, Dunbar said, seems to be, “‘Rather than finding
money from somewhere else in the budget, let’s just make the students
pay for it.’”
It’s not unusual for fees to suck up large proportions of the generally
small stipends paid to graduate teaching and research assistants, said
Jon Bomar, an officer of the National Association of
Graduate-Professional Students and a doctoral candidate in biomedical
engineering at the University of Maine.
“When we’re being paid at or below what might reasonably be considered
a living wage, taking another 10 or 20 percent out of that, that has a
huge impact on students,” Bomar said.
Universities resort to charging vaguely branded fees, he said, because
“it’s a way to raise the cost of education without having to make that
very publicly accessible.” Many graduate students, in fact, don’t
realize they have to pay these fees until they have accepted an
appointment. That’s because appointment offers often promise that
tuition will be waived without mentioning the fees, and some university
websites make a puzzle out of finding them.
“When you show up to school and have to pay $2,000 a semester that you
weren’t aware of or told you’d have to have to pay, it comes as a
surprise to a student,” Bomar said. “I don’t think it’s inaccurate to
say they’re hidden fees.”
Yet as angry as they are, “A lot of grad students get scared that
they’ll get kicked out of their labs if they speak out” about this,
said Dunbar.
That’s beginning to change.
In protests in April, including the day on which accepted students and
their parents visited the campus, graduate teaching and research
assistants at Stony Brook University demanded that the fees charged
there be eliminated.
Stony Brook’s “academic excellence and success fee,” which was $75 per
year when it was imposed in 2011, is now $375 per year, part of a menu
of mandatory fees that cost in-state graduate students $5,805.50 per
year, with another $180.50 increase scheduled for fall. That includes a
$125-a-year “college fee.”
“It’s just a backdoor way to raise tuition,” said Caroline
Propersi-Grossman, who was chief steward of the Stony Brook Graduate
Student Employees Union at the time of those protests.
A union representing more than 1,500 graduate teaching and research
assistants at the University of Illinois at Chicago went on strike in
March, partly over increases to the fees and assessments they were
being charged while making wages that start at $18,000 a year. The
students won a slight bump in pay, and reduced fees.
Graduate students at the University of Colorado Boulder have held
repeated demonstrations against fees that come to $2,088 per year for
law students and $1,732 for other graduate students. They’ve had some
success, too: A task force set up in response to the protests
recommended in a draft report that mandatory fees be dropped for
graduate students who teach and do research — over time, and assuming
funding becomes available.
Similar qualifications have accompanied rollbacks of fees at other
universities. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for
instance, where graduate students pay $2,035 per year in fees, has
announced that “some, but not all” mandatory fees will be eased “in
most cases,” beginning in the fall, for graduate students who also
teach and do research. But that will occur only if the students’
departments decide to subsidize the fees on their behalf, or if the
grants that pay for them allow it. A spokeswoman said there was no way
of estimating how many students would benefit, and to what extent.
At CU Boulder there’s no timeline to respond to the task force’s
proposal, a spokeswoman said, which the task force estimated would cost
the university an estimated $3.3 million a year.
CU Boulder graduate students complain that the mandatory fees consume
nearly 10 cents of every dollar of the $22,000-a-year stipends they
receive for teaching and conducting research. “It’s pretty absurd to
have to pay to do your job,” said Alex Wolf-Root, an organizer for the
graduate student union, which does not have formal university
recognition.
The CU Boulder task force report also gave a rare glimpse of why
universities are quick to add and reluctant to reduce fees. On that
campus, which has the equivalent of 30,389 full-time students, the
report said, every $13 reduction in undergraduate and graduate fees
would cost $1 million.
Weitz, at Georgia Tech, said fees on graduate teaching and research
assistants “may make sense as a way to raise revenues, but they create
a strange disincentive and penalize a class of workers who are at the
very lowest end of the salary range.”
Graduate students are “a core engine of research and discovery,” he
said. “By imposing these fees, we’re limiting our talent pool.”
This story about graduate students was produced by The Hechinger
Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on
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