xenologer | Thoughts on Butler's Economic Diversity.... (Reply)

Summary: Butler used to allow students to move off-campus after their sophomore year, and now this regulation has been changed and pushed back so that only seniors can live off-campus. The idea is likely to help Butler recover the funds necessary to pay back the bonds on which our Apartment Village and Health & Recreation Center were built.

Highly controversial, and I've finally decided to throw my two cents in for the sake of people in my demographic who aren't able or willing to do it themselves.

This first email was sent to the Opinion Editor for our school's online newspaper after we discussed this in class and she requested I explain my stance on the issue for the sake of an editorial.

The guy who told me that, if I was having problems meeting Butler's financial demands, perhaps a private university wasn't for me, wasn't my academic adviser (my academic advisers and faculty have all been way more supportive than the "official" administration). It was Tom Snider, if I recall. He has recently retired if I'm remembering my campus news.

(A side note from Butler's campus news: http://www.butler.edu/about/abo_news_story.asp?strBack=%2Fdefault.asp&iNewsID=997

As vice president for enrollment management, Weede sees his responsibility as "making sure Butler has the right students – the people coming in who will be able to make the most of what the university has to offer. It's the enrollment-management team that really helps get that done."

Think what you like of that. But back to the story!)

It was the first semester of my freshman year and when I realized that I had five thousand dollars to pay that year and no one to do it but me. I went and talked to the student accounts people, and when none of them could help me I went over their heads to speak with him.

It was admittedly a little late to get another grant or another scholarship, but when I told him that my parents were unwilling to cosign loans for me and asked for advice, he said that Butler calculates these things assuming that they will cover some of the cost, the student will cover some, and the family will cover the rest. I asked him what happened if the family couldn't or wouldn't make up that difference, and his response was basically that it has to come from somewhere and if I couldn't afford to make up that margin, perhaps I should consider transferring.

So here's what I've decided, and you can quote as much or as little of this as you want.

The idea that Butler has a real stake in keeping students at the school is bunk, and seems to influence their actual practice very little. Consider for a moment that students like me get a lot of aid. I'll admit it. Butler has picked up a lot of the bill for me. But students like me also cost the school a lot of money. However, living on campus is so expensive that it is simply not possible for many students to do it as their EFC (expected family contribution) rises. I'm one of those.

What better way to weed out those costly students than to keep everyone in as expensive a living space as possible? That way the low-income students drop out, and the school doesn't have to take the hit to its image for reducing aid. However, that's functionally what they're doing. They are not reducing aid, but they are raising the cost of living on campus to the point that aid becomes meaningless.

It neatly ensures that only a certain class of student graduates from Butler, while managing to place the blame on those who drop out for financial reasons. After all, Butler didn't do anything wrong. Poor students like that shouldn't have been here in the first place. Perhaps they should have made wiser decisions and protected themselves from the inevitable Butler-screwover.

Butler has found an excellent way to weed out the low-income students while maintaining its image and simultaneously blaming the victims for their misplaced ambition, for getting above themselves and trying to hack it at a university that doesn't care about students who take too large a bite out of that all-important Butler Fund.

This is the article she wrote, for the record.

I talked to Dr. Levester Johnson about this issue, since he'd been reported as saying even if all of Butler's students came to his office to protest this regulation, nothing would change.

Disturbing, eh? Have to wonder why we have student government at this rate.

Anyway.

I was talking to my advisor, EE, and she wanted to know how the talk had gone. I guess this is a hot issue among many of the faculty, who think it's as asinine as we do. I sent her an email as well at her request.

So here's what I wrote after I finished talking to Dr. Johnson.

I explained to him that students like me cannot afford to live in even the cheapest of campus housing and that, even aside from the cost of the apartment village, the students who live off campus for financial reasons will be up the creek thanks to this new regulation.

So let's play a game. I call it cost-benefit analysis. It's a popular game. I'm sure you've heard of it! All the cool kids are playing it nowadays.

The change in the rule affects first people who'd want to move off campus as soon as possible. These people are not interested in the benefits of being on campus, and therefore stand to gain little. Activities and events will be available to them that, quite frankly, they weren't interested in from the start.

The other kind of student affected is the student who moves off campus but /does/ want to be on campus. These students move in response to financial motivation rather than social. These students want to be involved and live on campus, and would if they could. However, being off campus is their only way to stay at Butler at all. Keeping these people on campus drains them financially to the point that they can't be here /at all/, let alone benefit from the much-lauded "campus life."

I have a lot of sympathy for the students who want to live on campus and cannot for financial reasons. I for one believe that the Butler experience is much-improved by being on campus, but the fact is many students must compromise that to stay here /at all/. If the opportunity to make that compromise is taken away, if it's really all-or-nothing, these students will have to go with nothing and drop out or transfer.

Like any good PR man, Dr. Johnson can speak to you forever and say nothing of consequence. His main point seemed to be that there are benefits to being on campus that the university believes students should have. However, that's a topic I've already covered.

Where then lies the benefit? If not to the students, it must be to the university. The school charges /and raises/ more money each year, and the benefit to keeping students on campus is that Butler gets their money for housing instead of a landlord. Even were campus housing of comparable price to off campus housing (which it is not by a long shot if you look around), Butler still benefits from being the one to provide (and by extension be /paid for/) that service.

The cost is to the students who must live off campus to remain at Butler. The benefit is to the university. To Butler, the cost (sacrificing a low-income demographic) pales in comparison to the benefit (revenue from those who can survive being cheated), and the cost is apparently written off by Dr. Johnson as necessary at best and irrelevant at worst.

There you have it. The value of retention is a myth. The fact is that certain kinds of students don't matter, and when there's profit to be had we're the first to go.

This has been a note from the canaries in the coal mine. There but for the grace of the Butler Fund go any of Butler's students, so underclassmen had better hope they can hurry up and graduate before their turn comes to be written off.

More to come perhaps. I don't know. She's apparently going to forward both of these little rants to a listserv she's on that has been up in arms over the issue.

Granted, I'm a member of the very last class that will live off campus as juniors, so this doesn't directly affect me. But that doesn't mean I can let students who came to this school with the same expectations I had just... get screwed. S'not how we roll here, dawg. It's funny that all people ask me to do in order to correct injustice is bitch. Not only that, but it's treated like some great miracle of ingenuity and courage that I'm willing to speak against this decision.

I guess this is what I do. Like a little angry wind-up toy. Point me in the right direction and off I go, tottering along for the sake of justice and freedom or something.