Driving down Fee Lane

If you haven’t visited the IU Office of the Bursar Web site at www.bursar.indiana.edu yet, you’re in for a real treat. This site allows you to access information about all the fees involved in attending IU. This eclectic bunch includes such old standards as admission application fees, activity fees, transportation fees and technology fees. Not to mention our old friends orientation, transcript retrieval and ID card replacement. And we can’t forget about drop/add access! \nOr, should we forget about drop/add access? \nThe bursar’s Web site lists the fee for drop/add access as $8 for each day a change is made to one’s schedule after two days of making the original schedule.\nThe process for dropping or adding a class involves the student logging on to OneStart, clicking the “Drop/Add Classes” link, searching for the desired class and either dropping or adding it via a click of the mouse. Not one of these measures requires significant work on the part of anyone besides the student.\nSo why the $8? Whose salary is it paying?\nIsn’t it the right of all students paying thousands of dollars in tuition to select the classes that give them the educations they want?\nThanks to faithful aids such as www.ratemyprofessors.com, students are able to get some idea of what a class will be like before signing up for it. But let’s face it, the fact that a certain professor was awarded a hot tamale icon is, unfortunately, not all the information we students need in today’s fast-paced world.\nSometimes there is just no way to tell, besides sitting in on a lesson or two, that a class is going to be too much work/not enough work/not interesting/the same class you took last semester under a different title/taught by a zombie. Is figuring this out and switching into something more appealing really worth $8?\nStudents at IU pay a lot of money to go here. Tuition aside, we pay for meal plans, buses we may or might or might not use and that “free” midnight breakfast during finals week. Is it really necessary for us to pay $8 to drop a class we deem unsatisfactory or to add a class because we want to learn more? Definitely not. \nWe might even accept the fee if it was already incorporated into our tuition, a fixed cost that everyone had to pay. Instead, the fee punishes those of us who want to specialize our learning the most, while forcing us to feel the strain on our wallets each time we adjust our schedules.\nHopefully the IU Student Association can get on this issue in 2007 and eliminate the drop/add fee. The academic year is still young, and there are plenty of classes to be dropped and added next semester. \nAdministrators might feel like $8 is a small sum, but that doesn’t mean it should be taken from us. Besides, $8 can buy a fair amount of overpriced candy from the C-store, a notorious study aid.