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Tony Avella, a Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, will hold an event at Hunter College this Friday to publicize his support for a return to free education at the City University of New York.
CUNY was tuition-free from its founding until 1975, when a fiscal crisis led the city to begin charging its students. (Not coincidentally, tuition was charged for the first time just six years after CUNY implemented an open-admissions enrollment policy.) Avella, who is currently running well behind Democratic front-runner Bill Thompson in primary polling, is the only candidate from either party to support a return to free tuition at CUNY.
Avella is himself a Hunter graduate, and the 11 AM event at 68th Street and Lexington Avenue will take place on CUNY’s first day of classes for the fall semester.
By the way, as Avella notes on his Twitter feed, the first of two primary election debates will be taking place on NY1 tonight at 7 PM.
More than a quarter of American colleges are now charging processing fees to students who pay their tuition with credit cards, and the practice is becoming more common.
Colleges typically pay credit card companies a 2% fee to handle such transactions, and with budgets shrinking, they are increasingly passing those fees — along with a surcharge, in some cases — on to students.
Virginia’s George Mason University, where half of all students pay by credit card, is imposing a new 2.75% fee for credit card use. The university’s controller expects that the change will produce revenue of $1.5 million a year.
July 14 update: Now comes word (from @globecampus on Twitter) that some Canadian students are banning such transactions entirely. As of September, Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia will prohibit the use of credit cards for tuition payments, in a move that may generate as much as $1 million in annual savings.
The Providence, Rhode Island mayor’s proposal to slap a “student municipal impact fee” on the city’s college students is being introduced as legislation in the RI state legislature.
The student tax, which I discussed here last month, would be an assessment of $150 per semester for all undergraduate and graduate students at the city’s four private universities. It’s intended to help close a multi million dollar municipal budget deficit.
Mayor Cicilline also put forward an alternate funding mechanism — a bill that would allow the city to collect fees directly from its largest tax-exempt institutions (the four universities plus five private hospitals). That bill would permit the assessment of such fees up to twenty-five percent of the taxes that the institutions would pay if they were not exempt.
Since their founding in the 19th century, California’s public colleges and universities have been tuition free for in-state students. For the last several decades, however, “tuition free” has been a hoax.
Over the course of the 20th century legislators and administrators imposed more and more new fees on California’s students, and in the 1960s and after those fees grew to match the tuition charged at other states’ universities. No politician wanted to be responsible for “ending free tuition” in the state, though, so today students pay nearly $4500 a semester in fees — including a $3130 “Educational Fee” — instead.
This kind of political cowardice is usually just annoying, but every once in a while it actually causes measurable harm to students, and right now is one of those times.
Congress passed a new GI Bill earlier this spring that pays the tuition of US veterans. The bill covers the full cost of tuition and fees at public institutions, and uses public tuition and fee rates to determine reimbursement rates for privates.
And yes, the tuition and fee rates are calculated separately.
So if you’re a California veteran and you get accepted to Stanford, the GI Bill will cover none of your $24,020 tuition. It will, however, cover all of your $84 student government fee. (In fact, it’ll cover up to $6,586.54 in fees every semester, far more than Stanford charges any student.)
There’s an effort underway to change the law, but no real movement yet.
The second of three students charged in a computer-hacking case at Florida A&M University has been sentenced to prison.
As Student Activism noted in March, Lawrence Secrease, Christopher Jacquette, and Marcus Barrington were accused of breaking into FAMU computers to raise students’ grades and change their residency records to allow them to pay in-state tuition rates. Seacrease and Jacquette pled guilty and testified against Barrington, who was tried and convicted.
Seacrease was sentenced to twenty-two months in prison yesterday, and Jacquette received the same sentence several weeks ago. Barrington faces sentencing next month, and could receive a term of thirty years.
studentactivism.net 
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