“The reality is people will pay whatever we charge them. There’s no end to what people will pay. In fact, the more you charge, the more they like it. People look around and say, ‘If they charge a lot, it must be good.’”
–Marcia Bromberg, Vice-President of Finance and Administration
An Open Letter to the People with Big Offices in North College:
Me and my family don’t agree on much. But we’re sick and tired of getting yanked around by your policies.
During Homecoming Weekend, I had a nice conversation with Joshua Boger, a member of the Board of Trustees, during a time when a handful of Trustees made themselves available to listen to student concerns. One of the most prominent themes of this meeting was the overwhelmingly painful fees charged to students.
Now, we know how elite Wesleyan is. It’s not a bad place to get an education. But the things we are forced to pay for are absurd and they make life very difficult for people who struggle to pay for an education. There’s a zone between “getting financial aid” and “easily paying for college,” and that is middle-class families who have put several kids through college and don’t qualify for aid. I’m in this zone. It means I pinch pennies a whole lot. I don’t buy book—’m not forced to. I get my books out of the library. I have a choice, and it’s a good one, because I save several hundred dollars, which will come in handy when I start paying off my loans.
I don’t have a choice about housing and food, though. I don’t have a choice because I am not allowed to opt out of the meal plan. We are forced to pay unreasonable rates for food because Wesleyan imposes our consumption of their monopoly. I could, for four months, live off of one-third of what I must pay for the meal plan. Housing? Almost a thousand dollars a month? That’s ridiculous—students who live off campus can easily pay half of that in rent and utilities. That would be a great option—but you’re putting increasing limitations on the numbers of people who may live off campus, and soon you’ll be eliminating that option altogether.
President Bennet, Vice-President Bromberg, in exchange for our tuition, we receive the inescapable requirement that we subscribe to services on which you have a monopoly.
You have done a lot of work to improve the campus. But why haven’t you done any work to improve the financial options for students? Is it because you just don’t care if you only offer “liberation through liberal education” to those who can comfortably afford to pay for it?
Yes, it must be difficult to offer these services. But the fact that all you’ve got to offer is extremely overpriced, poor-quality options shows both horrendous financial work on your part, and a willingness to accept solutions that abandon and disadvantage middle- and lower-class students.
Change it. You must offer competitive rates or a hassle-free option to be off of the meal plan, and to live off-campus. Not later. Not in 2010. Now. To do otherwise would be the latest in a string of insults to the student body and their financial supporters.
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