Some engineering students are taking part in a protest today, but heads of colleges are confused as to why.
Mechanical Engineering Graduate Student Advisory Committee chairman Philip Dyer is leading a campaign that is encouraging students to write a letter to the College of Engineering dean Richard Brown’s office and deliver it between noon and 1 p.m. today, protesting a $50 differential tuition fee.
Starting this semester, all engineering classes 3000 level and higher have a new differential tuition fee included, per the U Board of Trustee’s approval last spring. Undergraduate-level classes have a $35 fee per credit, and graduate-level classes have a $50 fee per credit.
However, Dyer said students weren’t informed until last Wednesday that 7000-level dissertation and thesis classes would also be subject to differential tuition fees. He said the department told students these classes were exempt.
College of Engineering assistant dean Michael Kay is not quite sure why some students and faculty thought dissertation and thesis classes would be excluded. He said the college has been clear that all engineering classes, level 3000 through 7999 would be subject to the fee from the beginning.
“The fact that this miscommunication happened concerns me,” Kay said. “It’s just not right.”
Kay said there was a mix-up in registration at the beginning of the year, and some classes were not charged differential tuition by mistake. He said this has since been fixed and shouldn’t have ever led students to believe certain classes were exempt.
An e-mail was sent out from U Student Services informing students that the classes that weren’t charged tuition during the glitch were now being charged as the problem in the system had been rectified. That’s how students found out their upper-level dissertation and thesis classes were being charged.
Kay said the new differential tuition fee was necessary to help ease the $4.2 million budget cut that the College of Engineering is undergoing in the next two years. He said the additional fees helped save the college from cutting programs.
Mechanical Engineering GSAC Vice President Andrew Vogt said about 30 people showed up to a meeting to organize today’s protest.
Dyer said he hopes that many engineering students will take part in today’s campaign and that it will convince the college to remove differential tuition for 7000-level classes.
