When we pay Columbia’s hefty tuition bill, it is easy to get lost in the array of charges that add up to almost $25,000 each semester. The student life fee is a charge that can easily be overlooked. With an increase of 58 percent over the past three years, this comparatively small—but still significant—charge has been making an increasingly large dent in students’ savings accounts. For the 2006-2007 academic year, the student life fee was $394 per semester, but, for the current semester, it is $621. This charge, though necessary to support many student activities on campus, should stop growing at its current rate.
The fee funds a variety of initiatives on campus. A portion of the revenues is distributed to student clubs and organizations through Funding at Columbia University. In the 2006-2007 academic year, $180 of each undergraduate’s student life fee was given to student organizations. In the 2009-2010 academic year, $198 of each undergraduate’s fee was distributed to student organizations—an increase of 10 percent over the past three years. This moderate increase in organizations’ budgets does not begin to match, and therefore does not explain, the increase in the fees that students pay.
The portion of the student life fee that does not go to student organizations is distributed to departments across campus to support a variety of student services. Libraries, residential advising, Columbia University Information Technology, the Center for Career Education, and the department of athletics and physical education all benefit from the fee. They in turn provide a variety of services. CUIT uses the funds to support things such as CourseWorks, student computer labs, and printing services. CCE uses the funds to host career fairs and run Columbia-specific internship programs. The athletics department has provided free student admission to Columbia sporting events, expanded Dodge Gym’s hours, and offered more opportunities for intramural sports. The services offered by these departments are beneficial to the student body, and the student life fee is rightly used to support such offerings.
The expansion of these services, however, cannot continue to be funded by such dramatic increases in the student life fee, especially in difficult financial times such as these. The extra money that students have been charged is enough to cover travel expenses or even a semester’s worth of textbooks. While supporting student life on campus is important, the stability of tuition is as well.
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