UB's out-of-state students woke up to a nasty (and perplexing) surprise in their university email inboxes Monday – not only would they be subject to yet another tuition increase, but a retroactive one charging them an additional $670 for the fall 2011 semester that, by my count at least, is already over.
Needless to say, this is poorly timed, insanely unnecessary, and massively dickish.
Without delving too much into the one obvious point to be made here – that retroactively charging someone for services already rendered and paid for is the sort of thing that even call girls and gang-bangin' drug dealers have the common courtesy not to do, and that our upstanding public institution for higher learning is evidently not above breaking this one and only faux pas of capitalistic economic exchange, ostensibly because every single member of the school's administration is a massive, massive asshole who doesn't give one single, solitary s*** about the students – let's examine the rationale behind this decision.
According to the email sent to, I imagine, pretty much every UB undergrad, this latest charge forced upon out-of-state students is due to the "approval of the NYSUNY 2020 application." This application gives the school the ability to charge additional – but ultimately unnecessary – tuition. I say ‘unnecessary,' because the university was evidently able to get through the fall 2011 semester without imploding under the massive financial strain of not charging a few thousand people an extra $700 and change.
And speaking of the university's finances, just how much difference can squeezing an extra few hundred dollars out of a few thousand people possibly make for an institution with a $500 million endowment and an undergraduate enrollment of nearly 20,000? Not much.
What it will do, though, is piss off a bunch of people. The university both obviously knows this and evidently doesn't care.
Why our fine university feels the need to continually do this is beyond me, especially to out-of-state students, given how low out-of-state enrollment already is. I can only imagine the pitch UB representatives give at out-of-state college fairs:
"If you're a resident of California, Virginia, Michigan, Georgia, Washington, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Texas, Ohio, Maryland, Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, Minnesota, Colorado, Indiana, Alabama, Delaware, Vermont, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Oregon, or Tennessee (28 states, for those who haven't kept track), not only is the flagship state university in your home state more highly ranked than UB, but it's also less expensive, so you have literally no reason to come here. Also, if you do decide for whatever reason to attend UB, you'll be subject to random hikes in your tuition, sometimes even retroactively, for no good reason, because f*** you."
Yeah, that doesn't sound very enticing to me, either.
If UB really wants to increase out-of-state attendance – and from my admittedly incomplete understanding of the matter, it does – it should probably stop treating out-of-state students like second-class citizens from whom it can extort increasingly large and unnecessary sums of money, especially since no one outside of upstate New York or South Korea gives a s*** about UB or whatever it might have to offer anyway, so treating those few who do with flagrant disrespect probably isn't the best way to recruit more in the future.
Just a thought.
Email: eabenoit@buffalo.edu
