By Matt Edgerton |Staff Writer|

Tuition fees increased yet again for the already impoverished students of CSUSB. But where is this money going?

The CSU Chancellor’s office said in a press release, “Pending final approval by the full board, the five percent increase will take effect for the winter/spring of 2011 and will raise tuition by $105 per semester for undergraduate students, $234 for credential program participants and $252 for graduate students.

Tuition will rise from the current $2,115 to $2,220 for the spring semester for full-time undergraduate students.

The committee also approved a recommendation to increase tuition by 10 percent for the 2011-12 academic year.”

The question to address with these constant fee increases is where is it going? Is it going to the students, facilities or teacher pay?  It seems the answer is that these increases go to stimulate enrollment so that the school can take more students in each year.

According to the CSUSB web site, there is an estimated 15,014 full time students in attendance at this school. A rough estimation just counting the undergrad increase ($105) will generate the school slightly more than $3 million dollars in revenue over the last two quarters.

Factoring in the credential and graduate student fee increases, we are looking at a substantial amount of cash, but as I’ve asked before, where is it going?

I asked the student body reading this article, have you seen an increase in school beautification? Or maybe there have been more classes made accessible to the student population?

At this time, as a student, all I’ve seen is classes have been harder to get, parking tickets more aggressively distributed, books are still asininely expensive and parking passes are still grossly overpriced.

Yet, it’s only going to get worse as time goes on. The Chancellor’s office stated that, “Pending approval by the full board, full-time tuition will increase by $444 per academic year for undergraduate students, $516 for credential program participants and $546 for graduate students for Fall 2011. Undergraduate tuition will rise from $4,440 to $4,884 per year.”

As referenced above, it looks like the student population will continue to face the issue of rising fees as we are confronted with another increase at the end of this year.

It seems this is our new reality.

I’m sure we will see constant fee increases in the coming years; if this year has been an indicator of future policy in 2012 it’ll probably be another five, 10 percent and before long we may be looking at tuition near the $6,000 per year mark.

Fees have increased a third over what we were paying just a couple years ago. In my opinion if the school were merely to reduce some of the cost associated with college the student’s would feel more appreciated, my vote goes to parking passes as I said before the passes are grossly overpriced.

If the school were to drop the price by $20 or so they would be much less painful for the students to purchase and overall I feel this would be highly visible way the school could give back to the students.

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