Another $4.64 in fees is going to be tacked onto the cost of a credit hour at UF, and it’s a hard pill to swallow since part of it ensures that graduate students get access to free health care at the cost of undergraduates.
UF has been trying to fund the program ever since it approved giving grad students free health care four years ago. But it was not able to secure funding from the state or anywhere else.
We are not against giving our teaching assistants and future professors free trips to the doctor; they pay a higher tuition rate and work hard in order to teach us lowly undergraduates. But we think someone else should get stuck with the bill.
The university line is that these new benefits will attract more and better grad students who will be able to provide better education to UF’s undergraduates. It makes sense when we try not to think too hard about it, but the reasoning quickly falls apart under the lightest scrutiny.
People choose to get their post-graduate degrees at UF for one reason: It will further their careers. Whether they have access to free health care is not and will never be the deciding factor. This is an unfair fee passed along to us with a healthy dose of faulty logic. Make no mistake, this is all about making UF look better on paper.
This fee keeps Machen’s goal of making UF a top-level school moving forward by devoting more money to graduate programs at the expense of undergraduates. Couple this with his cuts in undergrad enrollment in order to give us a better student-teacher ratio, and we end up with a declining population footing the bill for a ballooning number of post-graduates.
If the fee were to bring more graduate students and give us smaller class sizes we might see some benefits. But instead of trying to change UF and make it look better in theory, Bernie Machen should be focusing on keeping costs down, so the university remains the top choice for kids growing up in Florida. UF is one of the least expensive schools to attend in the state, and we get great value for our money by going to school here. If we keep increasing the cost in order to meet the average fees imposed by the other state schools, we will effectively be weeding out potential Gators based on how much they can afford to pay for a college education.
Last time we checked, state schools were supposed to strive toward educating everyone they could to the best level they could – not rearrange and divert money, so they can pretend to be a viable 50,000-student faux Ivy Leaguer in order to move up a couple rankings on an inconsequential list.
Had the university decided that it would give every student health care, we would support it and be happy to pay for it. How much would it cost in fees? A lot more, but it would be less expensive than health insurance and may even save students and their parents a good deal of money.
But who are we kidding? That is a ludicrous idea under our current leadership, as it would do nothing to close the gap between the university’s undergraduate and graduate spending.
