For this upcoming school year tuition will be raised by 3.2 percent, or $171 for in-state students and $456 for out of state students a semester. We see this sort of thing every year, so much in fact that we come to expect it.
This year students hoped it would be different though. During the spring semester Student Government lobbied tirelessly for a tuition timeout. This lobbying on the part of SG as well as the student body as a whole makes the tuition increase sting just a little more with the salt in the wound of being ignored.
This year’s tuition increase is coming due to a combination of components. The first being the overall decrease in funding from the state. This decrease has been constant over the past decade and while this was more understandable during the height of the recession, it should not be outrageous to wonder why funding hasn’t increased as the state budget has. This year specifically the more core cause for the increase is an unfunded mandate from the state of South Carolina. Essentially this is something that the state has said USC must do but without any help in funding it. This year’s mandate: paying for the implementation of the Affordable Care Act for select faculty and staff members.
There are several problems we see with this. The first problem is simply with unfunded mandates. If the state finds there to be something so desperately important for USC to do, they should find it somewhere in a budget to pay for it. The other is with what the mandate is funding and for who. The Affordable Care Act is not to blame here, but how the state has handled its implementation is. If the state of South Carolina needs to implement ACA for its employees, it should be paying for it, not students.
While USC is a state funded public university only 10.8 percent of funding comes from the state of South Carolina, meaning that tuition pays for the large percentage of the funding. With this small of a percentage coming from the state its questionable as to why legislators get so much of a say over the university.
We agree with the sentiments that President Harris Pastides put forth — students should be sure to lobby directly to lawmakers. This is also to say that students, when you see your button you picked up at a table on Greene Street that proudly proclaims “Tuition Timeout” and when you see a Timehop tweet about when you signed a letter to the State House, don’t let it discourage you and make you wonder where it went wrong. See it as an inspiration to continue forth and to not let state legislators forget who they represent and who’s best interest they should be looking out for.