Graduation fee preposterous

editorial cartoon by Kevin Johnstone
editorial cartoon by Kevin Johnstone

When an added expense is given to a University of La Verne student, a typical response is something like, “I pay $15,000 a year to come here and now I have to pay an extra 25 bucks?”

Extra fees can add up to a lot of money. And the fees can seem overwhelming, particularly the $90 graduation fee at ULV. Whether or not students agree with or understand where all of their money goes, the price of a college education is expensive and ULV is no exception. Trivial expenses such as lost meal cards and Residential Life registration cause many to bite their tongues and write checks that they pray will not bounce.

But what about the price seniors pay to wear their caps and gowns? This should be free for the blood, sweat and tears seniors have shed over the last four or five years, not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars in cash and loans.

Seniors pay a $90 fee to cover the expenses of graduation, an event prospective graduates have earned and paid for already. If ULV tuition covers anything at all, should it not be able to handle the supplies necessary for the event that marks the very reason people enroll in college in the first place—to graduate with a college degree?

When really thought about, $90 can certainly be a lot to dish out for fees, when the real world is out there, ready to be tackled by graduates. Putting it into a tentative perspective, $90 is almost a week’s rent. It can also be three or four tanks of gas, or food for about nine to 12 days, depending on individual needs. Ninety dollars can be a head start on a loan payment or a medical insurance payment, because after graduation, those without their own insurance will no longer be covered by ULV for medical emergencies. For some soon-to-be starving graduates about to enter the work force or the world outside campus for the first time, $90 can be part of a down payment for a new or used car, or even a bicycle or a pair of walking shoes.

For the most part, however, $90 may not be that much to gripe about considering the expense of college, especially private institutions like ULV where tuition is raised every year, and students even have to pay their professors to make up tests they may have missed.

In this day and age, everything costs money. For those seniors who have made it this far through ULV, right to the threshold of real life where only more expenses wait to be paid, $90 might seem affordable. The fee is the final nod to the past years of poverty spent in college that will also be the beginning of years of poverty to come paying back loans.

However, seniors do deserve a certain amount of respect for the work they have completed and the contributions they have made to the University of La Verne during their stay. Instead, graduation is looked at as one of the last warranted things left at ULV for seniors to complain about, “I’ve paid $60,000 to this university and now I have to give them my last 90 bucks so I can graduate?”

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Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Campus Times Editorial Board.

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