Fee hikes unfair burden to current grad students

After I read your recent article titled “UC regents stall
on graduate fee hikes” (News, May 27) I felt the reporting
was fair and balanced. However, I wanted to clear up one statement
made by the author.

“Some professional students would see no increases at all,
while others would pay an additional $1,076 for the 2005-2006
academic year,” the story said. In actuality, there are a
subset of professional school students who will likely see a fee
increase of approximately $4,000 in the 2005-2006 academic
year.

I am a first-year graduate student in the UCLA Department of
Public Policy. During the middle of this school year, our program
chair announced to our class in an e-mail that the UC Board of
Regents had reclassified our particular degree as a
“professional degree” rather than a graduate degree
program.

All told, this will translate to an increase in our student fees
of more than $4,000 dollars during the 2005-2006 academic year.
That is an increase of more than 50 percent in just one year.

This announcement has greatly upset most continuing students in
the program, and we have spoken out about it in recent regents
meetings for several reasons.

Firstly, when we applied and were accepted, the program was not
a professional program. Next year, the program will not change in
terms of content, but suddenly it will be dubbed a professional
program and be subject to a $4,000 fee increase. We had no reason
to expect this shift in definition when making our decision to
attend.

Secondly, this sudden increase places a financial burden on many
students who reasonably saved and budgeted for a figure much lower
than what it will now be. We cannot transfer to another school at
this point, and if we decide to leave the program altogether we
essentially forfeit the money we have already paid.

Lastly, many of us would have chosen another program if we had
been informed of the fee increase before attending UCLA. For
instance, I was offered scholarship money from another private
institution which would have made it cheaper for me to attend that
school, considering the fee increases at UCLA, and I have heard
similar stories from other students.

Our own department believes it is unfair to saddle the
continuing class with such a large fee increase in the middle of
our program, and our department chair has written a letter to the
Board of Regents to that effect.

The university says it needs to increase student fees to cover
losses from a lawsuit brought against it due to a past fee hike on
continuing students.

Here’s a thought ““ in order to prevent lawsuits from
outraged continuing students, stop outraging continuing
students.

Fox is a graduate student in the UCLA School of Public
Affairs.