Every year, Washington University students (or perhaps their parents) receive bill after bill after bill in their mailboxes. Whether it is for tuition, room and board, cable, or Internet service, the fees can be overwhelming and at times seem unending.
This year, tuition is at an all-time high of $14,150 per semester. Add in housing and meal plan charges of anywhere from $4,000-$5,000 each semester and you are spending close to $38,000 a year to take classes and live on campus. And don’t forget that additional $125 Internet service charge each semmester.
This charge is a fee on top of the ones described above. That means students receive a separate bill once they activate their Ethernet connection. The University should consider including this expense with the room and board charge or even make it a mandatory fee so that students can apply their scholarships and stipends to cover this cost.
Last year, administrators decided to include telephone service in the room and board fees. This eliminated the inconvenience of students having to pay a monthly phone bill to Telephone Services. It also allowed all students to have telephones in their rooms, making it easier for advisors and University administration to contact them about pertinent information.
According to Vice Chancellor Justin Carroll, the Resident Student Advisory Board (RSAB) and Congress of the South 40 (CS40) officials worked to implement this change last spring and have in fact been working on such ideas over the past few years. Several years back, these groups were bold enough to propose the idea of including telephone, cable, and Internet charges in room and board fees. A referendum was held, and many students at that time backed the phone and Ethernet proposals, with these two in particular winning the most support.
In the end, administrators were not convinced that the number of students who voted in the referendum and supported the change was large enough to lead to its implementation. Still they seem to be open to the concept, especially if they were willing to include phone service in the room and board fees for this academic year.
If the support of students and of groups like RSAB and CS40 are not enough, many other universities across the country require students to pay a technology fee or include the cost of Internet service in a room and board charge. Students at Rice University are required to pay a telecommunications fee of $69 for phone service. In addition, students living on campus pay an information technology fee of $100; students not living in on-campus housing at Rice still must pay a technology fee of $200. At New York University, many of the room rates (both apartments and traditional dormitory style living) already include telephone, Ethernet, and cable TV costs.
Undoubtedly, making the Internet connection charge a required fee would make the job of Residential Technology officials much simpler, as they would not have to deal with as much paperwork, and Ethernet ports would most likely be activated automatically. As most students rely on a computer to do their assignments, check e-mail, or chat with friends, it follows that including Ethernet service in a type of required fee would not be exorbitant.
An Internet charge will appear somewhere, whether it is an independent fee paid separately from room and board charges or it is included within these costs. The key issue is that if this fee is a part of room and board costs, scholarships and stipends students receive could be used to cover this cost. In the end, the elimination of an additional Internet fee would lead to increased convenience for students, ResTech officials, and even administrators; this alone should be enough to make this idea a reality.