Brooke Skiba
Features Editor
Over spring break, many students and parents were alarmed to receive a letter about yet another tuition hike for the next school year. Though this 4.6 percent raise to $51, 600 a year caused financial complications for many students and families, some felt they did not have an outlet to express their concerns about these challenges. Wooster Student Union (WSU), which has been discussing the transparency of the College’s spending for some time, decided this was the perfect opportunity to collaborate with the student body for change.
WSU originally discussed many different courses of action such as demonstrations, but after discussions with other student groups both on and off campus, they decided to pursue a more collaborative direction. The idea of a survey was thrown around, but WSU member Zoe Kopp-Weber ’14 had another solution.
She said, “I’m so sick of people doing surveys. It’s a very passive approach. We need to put a real face on the effect that the raise of tuition has on people.”
Kopp-Weber posed an alternative route — having students write letters describing how the raise in tuition is affecting them. Thus began the Raising Your Voice Against Raising Tuition campaign. The group tabled at Lowry starting Monday, April 8 until Wednesday, April 17 in order to encourage student involvement through letter writing. WSU provided a generic form letter with an optional space for students to include their own stories. An online form was also available for those who couldn’t make it to the tabling times.
According to WSU leader Gareth McNamara ’14, WSU is not trying to lower tuition.
He said, “We are sending the letters to the president’s office to make him aware that there is this demand among the student body to not reverse this particular hike, but to address student concerns about it. To give us the opportunity to be involved in decisions like this and to not have it sprung on us in the future as we feel it has been done so far.”
Ultimately, the group would like to have students actively involved in the financial procedures.
“We’d like to have students meaningfully involved in the process,” member Bobby Persons ’15 said. “Not just observing it, but taking part. The first step is transparency, because right now the whole process is completely opaque to students — how they make these decisions and why they’re made.”
While McNamara acknowledged that the College has held events like Budget 101 in an attempt to explain where the money goes, he says that students feel not enough has been done. The discussion of transparency in the College’s spending has been ongoing for several years, so McNamara feels this campaign is a push forward in the same direction toward better communication.
WSU plans to collaborate with Students Against Outsourcing in the near future to organize an outdoor forum event in which students will be able to share stories of how the tuition raise is affecting them with peers and members of the administration. Wooster Student Union meets on Thursdays at 7 p.m. in Lowry 118.