Editorial: Ambiguous senate bill raises questions

The Ohio State Senate introduced a bill that would require Ohio universities to submit an action plan to reduce the cost of attendance for in-state students by five percent.

“We leave the ‘how’ up to the leadership at our great colleges and universities because we understand there are many ways to accomplish these savings, and we recognize they know how to do this best at their particular institutions,” Senator Keith Faber, the bill’s sponsor, told the IC.

The bill would not require these cuts to come from tuition and general fees that universities collect, which is the heaviest financial burden students carry.

This proposal of lessening financial burden sounds wonderful in theory, but we feel the ambiguity of the bill allows for institutions like the University of Toledo to loosely interpret what lowering “the cost of in-state student attendance” really means.

UT is already planning and formulating where a possible five percent cut might come from. We have been told that the committee tasked with creating this plan interprets the cut as a reduction in “the cost to instruct a student,” according to Rhonda Wingfield, director of UT’s Office of Financial Planning, Analysis and Budget.

As college students, this concerns us slightly. That’s why we choose to attend college in the first place — to be instructed, learn valuable skills and receive the best possible education for our money. Cutting costs in instructing students could imply various outcomes and we’re left with more questions than we have answers for.

If students are encouraged to utilize fewer valuable and costly university resources, such as textbooks, professors, counseling centers and parking, then obviously it will cost less money to educate a student, which would indeed achieve a five percent cut. But is this really best for students’ well-being?

One of the main ideas UT has put forth is to reduce the amount of time that students spend at UT working on their degree, thus accelerating their path to graduation. UT’s logic is that if a student spends less time in college, he or she will accrue less financial burden and therefore have a five percent cut in the cost of attendance.

We do acknowledge that UT’s only idea isn’t to expedite the graduation process and turn this school into a degree mill, but we also want to stress that we don’t want to go down that path – or be pushed into incentive-based discounts for students who stay on the four-year degree track.

As students at UT, we pray and live for cuts in the cost of our college education — after all, most of us are practically broke. If our tuition was lowered by five percent, we would be keeping an extra $200 in our pockets, although it’s a shame that in reality, it would only be $200 less in loans we’d still owe.

Now, we aren’t actually asking for a decrease in tuition; we understand that a good education warrants an expensive bill and that we are only going to reap the benefits if we are collectively willing to pay for them. But we also don’t want to be hurried out of college with only a piece of paper saying we have a degree after so many years of hard work and studying.

A five percent cut in student cost of attendance would greatly help students, and maybe it’s possible to work with students to find out where cuts make the most sense.

As a group of students, we think costly aspects of attending college also include paying for textbooks, parking permits, housing every semester, and the cost of food or a meal plan. Consequently, we would love to hear UT brainstorm some creative ways to reduce these costs of attendance.

On a related note, we don’t just want our classrooms and books to become online forms of virtual reality in an effort to try to cut costs, and we don’t want our libraries to flood with a waterfall every time it rains. Instead we would prefer that the university uses the money it does have to fix very pressing issues on our campus.

Cuts do make financial sense, but we hope UT will be very careful and vigilant that these cuts by no means intrude on the welfare of the student body or impede on the quality of our education.