As we begin the new year, most students are hurting from an over 34 percent increase in the cost of our education from last year. The 34 percent coming from the CSU Board of Trustees and other increases coming from our local campus 8212; such as the widely contested instructionally Related Activities (IRA) Fee. This fee has grown in leaps and bounds much to the chagrin of students.
The IRA fee increased $160 from last year to the disapproval and lack of consent of many students. It’s hard to imagine how such a fee could be imposed on students without their consent. Upon closer examination, though, it seems the IRA fee was never expected or planned to grow to be such a large amount.
The fee dates back to 1974 when former Assemblymember Ray E. Johnson introduced an amendment to the State Education code that has lead to the misuse and porkbarreling of the IRA fee. Assembly Bill 3116 went into affect in 1975 and explicitly defined what “instructionally related activities were:
“Those activities and laboratory experiences which are at least partially sponsored by an academic discipline or department and which are, in the judgment of the president of a particular campus, with the approval of the trustees, integrally related to its formal instructional offerings.”
The bill then went on to enumerate categories that this fee could fall into, the first of which being intercollegiate athletics 8212; I have never though of athletics are being germane to my educational experience and most recently have only seen it as a hindrance to a quality education.
The unexpected consequences that we are now dealing with arte a direct result of the poor planning of this legislation which did not provide any sustentative implementation or operation guidelines.
When the fee was first discussed in 1978, it was discussed as a maximum annual fee of $10 per student. Emphasis on the word maximum. This maximum has been all but ignored many times over as increases have been forced on our local campus both in 2004 and now in 2009.
Of course, the Associated Students would be supportive of this measure and maintaining it because one of the stipulations the CSU Board of Trustees approved was that AS would no longer be expected to provide financial support for IRA on a regular basis.
This proved to be a relief for AS as an organization, but not for the students it supposedly represents.
The Education Code states the use of the fee to be for a “basic competitive program.” It’s obvious that the University is using the fee directly or indirectly to cover salaries and other expenses associated not with a “basic” program, but for a program necessary to compete on a NCAA Div I stage. The major expense to point out is the head football coach’s salary, which for Chuck Long was $715,900. The bill anticipated this kind of misuse, which is why it includes the term “basic” so that this fee wasn’t used to fund an arms race in athletics.
There’s a reason why students don’t have a voice in this fee and haven’t for almost three decades, it’s time we changed that and even now, we can work to prevent future increases in the future8212;or if not make sure they are actually used to supplement our quality of education, which is already at risk after so many budget cuts this year alone.
