Letters to the Editor: Student service fee increase will add up negatively

You do not need a university degree to learn, but it sure helps you earn money.

At 6:58 a.m. on Thursday, there were tons of cars on the road. Inside of each vehicle was someone gliding along to his or her profitable job that makes waking up early and sitting in traffic day-after-day, week-after-week, seem like a no-brainer. There is something else in each of those vehicles, and if you back up, you can see it — a college degree.

The University of Houston is one of the few public universities locally available to the city’s more than 2.1 million people. If we want people who want to work to be able to work, we need to make university degrees financially-accessible. Believe it or not, the cost of a degree is not universal and is not set by some higher powers. Sometimes, the control actually lies in our own hands.

Members of the Student Fees Advisory Committee propose to increase the per-semester student service fee by $50.

Given that entering students have at least eight semesters in front of them and the federal student loan rate in 2012-13 will be 6.8 percent, and that many loans run for 10 years, the fee increase would mean that someone without money is $550 further away from getting a university degree.

You can vote today and tomorrow almost anywhere on campus.

—Lara Appleby

Biology graduate student

Tags: Houston, student fees, UH, vote