Arizona State University’s Undergraduate Student Government is fighting an unpopular proposed increase to the fee students are required to pay to attend Barrett, the Honors College.
USG Senator Nicole Morote said no one really knows why the school wants to increase its fees from $750 to $1,000.
In March, Morote proposed a bill to the USG in an attempt to stop the proposed increase. The bill explained that the student body was not in favor of the change.
“We did a survey of just under 500 Barrett students and maybe 5 percent of the student population was in favor of the increase,” Morote said.
She said she proposed the bill “on the grounds that (the fee) hadn’t been properly justified to the student body.”
“I’ll tell you what Barrett has told us: ‘To improve the student experience,’” Morote said. “What does that mean? We were asking for substantive information and that was most certainly not received.”
A spokesperson for ASU said via email that the increase is necessary for the college’s continued development on all four ASU campuses. The fee is needed to account for an increasing amount of faculty and to “develop and furnish new instructional, residential, and student activity spaces.”
The honors college started holding meetings on Feb. 6 to discuss with students the idea of increasing the college’s semester fee by $250. The meetings were held by deans and business managers of Barrett to gauge student reaction, according to USG Downtown’s Facebook page.
But, for the most part, student reaction “has been pretty consistently negative about the increase,” according to Morote. Students have cited inequality for certain students and the financial burden of the fee when arguing against the proposal.
Kyle Israel, a sophomore downtown Barrett student, said the fee was unfair because Barrett doesn’t provide equal experiences for its students across the campuses.
“I don’t like it,” said Israel. “I feel like downtown (campus) has less accommodations for Barrett compared to the regular students. In Tempe, I feel like you get more.”
Others pointed to how the fee might be particularly heavy on out-of-state students.
“I don’t agree with it honestly, I feel like it’s a financial strain on a lot of students,” said Nicole Shinn, a freshman at Barrett’s Downtown campus. She later added that it would be especially so “for out-of-state students because it’s ridiculously expensive to go to school here, if you’re out-of-state.”
Some students said that they might leave the honors college if the $250 increase was passed.
“My co-senator ran a statistical analysis that determined that a pretty substantial chunk of Barrett students would be considering leaving Barrett, and I don’t think that’s completely unreasonable,” said Morote.
The Arizona Board of Regents is scheduled to meet April 2 to vote on whether or not to approve the fee increase.
Contact the reporter at nhthomps@asu.edu.
