Many Arizona State University students are unhappy to learn that their university is not discontinuing charges for athletics and facilities, which have largely been closed, and will not be giving most students a break on tuition, despite new distance learning measures.
Tuition items in question include ‘recreation fee,’ ‘student athletics fee’ and ‘student services facility fee.’ These so-called ‘student initiated fees’ are about $300 per student. That, multiplied by the over 70,000 students who attend ASU, rakes in millions for the university every semester.
Fitness centers and other campus facilities will remain closed or will operate with reduced capacity for the foreseeable future due to the coronavirus.
Marco Peralta, a senior sports journalism major at the downtown campus, said that he was “disappointed” to learn that recreation and facility fees would be kept in place. He’s an out-of-state student from California and said his family doesn’t have extra money to help him with tuition and fees.
“It makes me feel that (ASU) is just looking at their students as dollar signs,” Peralta said.
A Change.org petition created by sophomore journalism student Sophia Parsa demanding that the Arizona Board of Regents step in and lower tuition for out-of-state students, has generated over 1,100 signatures.
ASU justifies keeping tuition and fees the same because they say that the university has spent “tens of millions of dollars” modifying classrooms for hybrid learning and other expenses related to COVID-19.
“Fees associated with attending the university remain the same as they contribute to facilities and activities that provide continued services to students,” said a university spokesperson. “…moving to fully-interactive remote learning and student services didn’t save money – our expenses increased.”
“You’re paying for an in-person experience, but it’s mostly online now”
Emma VandenEinde, 20, is an undergraduate journalism student at the Cronkite School. Last semester, she was named Cronkite’s “Student of the Week” for her reporting on her self-isolation in the dorms. But the senior said she contemplated taking the fall semester off because she wondered if the quality of classes would be worth the out-of-state tuition costs.
“I like the in-person experience. I like going out in the field. I like touching the cameras,” VandenEinde said. “You’re paying for an in-person experience, but it’s mostly online now… how do you compensate for that?”
ASU did not issue tuition refunds for the spring semester, but in order to entice students to move off-campus, the university offered students a $1,500 nonrefundable credit—not for rehousing purposes, but to apply to fees and outstanding balances on their account, according to reporting by The State Press.
Other students recall issues with online learning when the classes abruptly pivoted to online-only in March.
Biology students had to complete courses with intensive lab components from home; Journalism students selected to complete their professional programs at the Washington D.C. or Los Angeles bureaus, instead reported on stories from their apartments and dorm rooms.
Some students said they were kept in the dark about what the rest of the spring semester was expected to look like.
Sophomore Aislyn Gonzalez is studying microbiology on the Tempe campus, and said that she felt unprepared when her courses moved online in spring.
Gonzalez, 19, said that she and other classmates stopped receiving correspondence from her pre-calculus professor when ASU made the shift to online-only classes. “I would keep emailing my original professor and I would never hear anything back, and then by the end of the semester I ended up having a different teacher,” she said.
While she was originally doing well in the course, the lack of instruction and communication caused her to fall behind. She said she eventually passed the course, but barely.
Gonzalez said that she is concerned about the upcoming semester, as the majority of her classes will again be online-only, including difficult courses she said she would have preferred to take in person.
ASU criticized for perceived lack of transparency with federal COVID funds
When Congress passed a $2 trillion aid package in response to the coronavirus pandemic back in March, a portion of that money was set aside for higher education. ASU, the country’s largest public university, received one of the biggest grants in the country at $63.5 million.
According to the Department of Education, money should first be applied to emergency grants to keep students in school.
But it wasn’t immediately clear how the university intended to spend the money. ASU would not provide details to news outlets, and in May, announced that they would not immediately spend the money on students, but instead hold onto the money to distribute at a later date, according to The Arizona Republic.
The university did eventually distribute some of the federal COVID funds. On June 10, the university released an itemized list of roughly where the money set aside for students would go–$31.7 million–which will be allocated for about 14,000 primarily low-income and scholarship-holding undergraduate and graduate students.
The university will take a year to distribute funds.
Danielle Skranak, 25, is a law student at ASU who works as a paralegal at a Scottsdale-based law firm, which handled the Paycheck Protection Program.
“I have lots of friends who go to UA or GCU, NAU. Their president(s) and their administration(s) seemed to have been really forthcoming,” Skranak said.
Some of her friends studying at other Arizona universities received grants back in April.
Shranak wanted to get in touch with ASU President Micheal Crow himself. “I had just started guessing extension codes until I got it right.”
Eventually, she did and left Crow a voicemail lambasting him for his slow response in dispersing emergency funds.
She said she eventually got an email response from Michele Grab, the assistant vice president of student services, who affirmed that a certain percentage was already dispersed to low-income students.
“I am friends with a lot of low-income students and none of them received money, nor did I,” she said. “There really is no information (about) who got it, what they were looking for and this that and the other.”
Contact the reporter at mkackley@asu.edu.
Madeline is the community editor for Downtown Devil and is a senior studying at the Walter Cronkite School. She is a local freelance journalist who primarily covers politics, policing, immigration and business. In 2019, she won first place in her category in the national SPJ Mark of Excellence Awards for her reporting on deported veterans in Tijuana, Mexico with Cronkite News.
