Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Hidden Fees

I get to ride the bus for free in Stillwater! Well, that's not true. I do not have to pay any additional fees to ride the bus. I was going through the cost of tuition for attending school, and there are a lot of things that I'm paying for, whether I want to or not. Things like the Academic Excellence fee ($360.50), the Academic Facilities fee ($147.00), the Student Union Renovation fee ($60.90), the Student Activities and Student Activities-A fees ($35 and $42, respectively), and the parking and transit fee ($32.20).

I guess my problems with it is that tuition is pretty stonking high already and then they glob all of these extra things on top. The Student Union looks nice, but why do I have to pay for the renovation that (as far as I can tell) already happened? I do like that by showing my ID I get to ride the bus for no (additional) charge, but what if I didn't have to ride the bus? And why is called parking and transit fee, if we still have to buy a parking pass? And why are there two student activity fees? Why not just have one fee at the combined price? That one's just weird to me.

Maybe my problem isn't the extra fees, it's knowing what they go to. Tuition I don't have any argument with because that's for my education, but if I knew how much of my tuition went to stocking the faculty lounge with donuts, I'd probably be telling a different tale.

2 comments:

Crystal said...

I know what you mean. It would probably be better if they didn’t itemize the bill. When I attended Cal State San Marcos I had to pay an athletic fee. Since I was attending class once a week for a teaching credential, I didn't even know where the athletic field was.

Marc R. said...

"Stonking" may be a word, but it is slang. While slang is not necessarily wrong, it is not always appropriate, depending on the audience and the purpose for writing. Perhaps that is what your critic had in mind.